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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/29/world-plastic-pollution-petrochemical-giants-un-treaty-2015-paris-lobbyists>
"Last week, in an enormous convention centre in downtown Ottawa, I joined
delegates who have been negotiating over the most important environmental deal
since the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.
The global plastic treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding,
international agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics
life cycle, from the initial extraction of fossil fuels for plastics production
to the end-of-life disposal of plastic waste. The current meeting is the fourth
of five scheduled negotiations and is critically important – without agreement
on the objectives, structure and key measures, the prospect of agreeing on the
final treaty text by the end of 2024 seems ambitious.
It was Inger Andersen, the UN Environment Programme executive director, who
compared the deal to the Paris accords – and she’s right. The need to confront
plastic pollution head-on is urgent because plastic pollution contributes to
the three greatest global environmental crises of our time: the climate crisis,
biodiversity loss and chronic pollution. The effects of plastic pollution on
human health are becoming clearer. Plastic traces have been found in our blood
and in human placenta, brain and lung tissue. They are known to increase the
risk of health conditions, including cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative,
cardiovascular and age-related diseases.
Plastic pollution is not only about plastic waste. Pollutants are released at
all stages of the plastic life cycle, including extraction, manufacture, use
and disposal. So far, efforts to tackle it have primarily focused on the
disposal phase, through end-of-life waste management techniques, including
better waste collection systems and the expansion of recycling, incineration
and landfill capacity.
But these approaches do not prevent the release of pollutants earlier in the
life cycle, nor do they significantly reduce the climate impacts of plastics,
the vast majority of which happen before the plastic becomes waste. It is also
clear that these systems cannot cope with the burgeoning volumes of plastic
production that exist in the world. We cannot continue to rely on methods to
tackle plastic pollution that we know do not work.
Instead, we must focus our efforts on tackling plastic pollution at its source.
There is now compelling evidence that only a reduction in primary plastic
polymer production, or virgin plastic, will deliver a substantive cut in
plastic pollution. This is set out in a recent scientific paper (in a journal
that I edit) in which the authors argue that reducing virgin plastic production
is the quickest and most cost-effective way to reduce plastic pollution. For me
and many others, this approach has compelling logic, as not creating so much
plastic in the first place would eliminate the climate and biodiversity impacts
of the “avoided” plastic."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
