The amount of plastic waste around the world continues to grow, ushering in a rising environmental, economic and public health crisis that affects everyone and everything on the planet.
A 2022 report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) projects that humans produce about 460 million tons of plastic each year. Without immediate action, that amount is projected to triple by 2060.
On Thursday, July 24, environmental experts gathered for Turning the Tide on Plastic Waste: A Newsweek Live Event hosted by Newsweek’s Environmental and Sustainability Editor Jeff Young. During the hour-long virtual event, panelists discussed the state of the plastics issue and how the global community is coming together to help solve it.
The panelists included Steve Alexander, president and chief executive officer of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR); Dr. Douglas McCauley, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley; and Erin Simon, the vice president and head of plastic waste and business at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
This panel comes weeks before the UN meets again in hopes of finalizing a historic treaty that would address the full lifecycle of plastic, from production and design to collection, disposal and recycling. Talks began three years ago and the last round of talks in December ended in a stalemate without a treaty.
McCauley said the scale of the plastics problem the global community is facing is “immense,” which makes the opportunity to solve it with new negotiations “really exciting.”
As a marine biologist, he outlined the real negative impacts of plastic pollution. There is a threat to biodiversity and the habitats of marine life, and a human health impact with the rise of microplastics in our food and water supply. In terms of climate change, McCauley said that without a solution, greenhouse gas emissions from continued plastic production will increase by 37 percent.
“It’s pretty serious for us, pretty serious for our planet, and the problem is only growing,” he said. “Without intervention, without a strong treaty, business as usual will take us to a 2050 where we double the amount of plastic pollution on our planet.”
So what’s the solution?
Erin Simon has been present at the previous rounds of UN negotiations and is optimistic that the next meeting will yield positive and impactful results.
She said that while there is “no silver bullet” for the problem of plastic waste, the opportunity for a collective global agreement has the potential to accelerate humanity’s ability to solve it.
While the final draft of the treaty is still in the works, Simon said the 193 countries are aligned on a few measures. This includes getting “problematic” materials out of production, designing more sustainable plastic, financing the transition to a recycling infrastructure and making sure these agreements can be strengthened over time.
“In this next session, it is our hope that we set the glide path for all of those in the right direction,” she said. “It is our hope that we find ways to build more bridges than we seem to have burned in the last sessions of negotiations.”
At APR, Steve Alexander said the organization has design and testing guides for plastic packaging and recycling that are referenced around the world. While these guidelines, and many others related to sustainability and recycling, are helpful, they are also voluntary. He said the UN treaty needs to have some level of standardization.
Having a global standard will allow countries to work together along the plastic waste chain to promote a more circular system of reuse and recycling at every stage of life for plastics.
Simon agrees with this point, noting that the policies of individual companies, states or countries are not enough to solve the overall problem.
“That’s why we have the process to develop global agreements, because those come about when countries realize they cannot solve a problem on their own, that it needs to be something that is coordinated,” she said. “It’s not going to solve for everything, but it has the ability to create this coordination [and] standardization.”
In the three Rs of sustainability, reduction comes before reuse and recycling. The panelists agreed that the first step to reducing waste is to reduce the production of new, or virgin, plastics.
Alexander said that using recycled materials instead of virgin materials reduces energy utilization and greenhouse gas emissions by about 80 percent.
He added that policymakers and other stakeholders say they would love to use more recycled material, but the price is too high.
“When you’re taking a material and you’re adding to it, there is a cost,” he said. “And typically, recycled costs more money than virgin. That is the reason or excuse that is used a lot for why we don’t have a market for recycled material.”
But McCauley notes that the cheaper upfront cost of producing virgin plastic is “deceptive” because countries will have to bear the environmental and public health costs of increased plastic waste.
By pairing incentives, such as the threat of hefty fees for non-recyclable plastics, with investments in recycling and waste management, the panelists explained, countries can drive job growth and economic activity while achieving substantial environmental benefits.
For example, Maryland and Washington recently joined California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Oregon in adopting extended producer responsibility (EPR) policies that hold plastic producers accountable for the costs of dealing with the management of end-of-life plastics.
“There’s just money on the table for us through EPR systems because it creates a more valuable product, more jobs, it creates more domestic production and for companies, it helps them to have clear guidelines of how they can produce, where they design, and where it should go so that they can get it back again and use it over and over again,” Simon said.
Looking ahead to the next round of UN treaty talks in Geneva, Switzerland, next month, the panelists were overall hopeful and determined to get a result that will make a real impact.
“I am, by construction, an optimist,” McCauley said. “I think that the world has got the memo that this is a grand problem. I’ll underline again, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to actually come together and solve this. So this makes me want to move as far forward as we can with this international solution.”
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