12/22/2023 0 Comments Toy straw broomMany existing waste management techniques have already been shown to reduce plastic pollution and demand for plastic in the first place. This will involve gradually banning single-use plastics that have little reuse value, such as thin plastic films used in food packaging, as well as instituting robust collection, reuse, and recycling efforts. Ghana and several other countries worldwide are currently working to establish a country-level circular economy for plastic, says Oliver Boachie, who chairs the African Group of Negotiators for the UN treaty-making process and is an advisor to the Ghanaian government. Proponents often describe the concept as an attempt to imitate the natural world, where there is no waste everything has a use. Circularity can mean reusing or recycling plastics, or employing alternatives that can be reused or recycled as well. How can we make less plastic, and deal with the pollution that already exists? Circularity may be the most promising answer. Limits or levies could “affect all sectors of the economy” and “create a lot of unintended consequences for those least able to afford it,” says Stewart Harris, the group’s senior director of global plastics policy. The American Chemistry Council, the trade group that represents plastic producers, has also not embraced such policies. “We want the strongest and most ambitious obligations that we can get consensus around.” “We really need to find a way to bring everybody on board,” this person said, and such “supply side” changes might be unpalatable to certain countries. Limits or levies on production are not currently being considered as a solution, according to a member of the US State Department (which coordinates the country’s delegation at the UN meetings), who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Noting that the plastic industry generates upward of $700 billion a year in revenues, the UN Environment Programme also concluded that the industry “inflicts a heavy burden on human health and environmental degradation, with the poorest in society facing the highest impacts whilst contributing the least to plastic over-consumption and waste.” Plastic pollution-“a scourge on a planetary scale,” as French president Emmanuel Macron has put it-most affects those least able to deal with its consequences. If current trends continue, humans will have produced 34 billion tons of plastics by 2050-three times the current total. Production is projected to continue growing, at about 5% annually. Plastic production has grown dramatically in recent years in fact, half of all plastics in existence have been produced in just the last two decades. According to the National Academy of Sciences, that’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute. Some of it reaches the sea estimates suggest that between 8 million and 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and 19% has been incinerated. Significant quantities of these plastic bits have turned up in common fruits and vegetables, as one recent study in Italy found.īecause consider this: most of the plastic we make, 72%, ends up in landfills or the environment, according to a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week-mostly from water. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide in the air we breathe and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses. Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. That’s the equivalent of making 200,000 bottles per minute. These numbers are understandably hard to make concrete sense of, even at the scale of specific companies, such as Coca-Cola, which produced 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017.
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