An international agreement to end plastic pollution is due to be sealed this year in Busan, South Korea. At the penultimate round of negotiations, held in Ottawa, Canada, Rwanda and Peru proposed a target to cut the weight of primary plastics produced worldwide by 40% by 2040, compared with 2025.

This is the first time that a limit on the production of plastic has been considered at the UN talks aiming to develop an international legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. Of the potential mechanisms for tackling plastic pollution, a cap on plastic production was the most hotly debated, but one has not made it into the draft text of the treaty—not yet, at least.

However, all efforts to scientifically model the extent of plastic pollution in the future assume that restricting how much plastic the world makes each year will be necessary (among other measures) to curb its harmful presence in the environment.

In a 2020 study I co-authored, my colleagues and I found that primary plastic production—the creation of new synthetic polymers, largely from fossil fuel—will need to be 47% lower in 2040 compared with the rate measured in 2016.

This scenario would involve plastic production falling by as much as our research team considered practicable. It would predominantly mean everyone using significantly less plastic and substituting it with paper and materials that are compostable.

Cutting production almost in half and using all other strategies, such as ramping up recycling and disposing of plastic waste in landfills or via incineration plants, would still leave residual pollution in 2040. In fact, just under 50 million metric tons of plastic would still be flowing into the ocean and rivers each year or accumulating on land where it may be burned in the open and create even more pollution.

In a 2022 report, the OECD estimated that cutting demand for plastic by 33% relative to 2019 (and enhancing recycling alongside preventing plastic escaping the waste management process) would almost eliminate mismanaged plastic waste by 2060—that is, plastic that end up as pollution in the environment.

A combination of measures such as these is considered the most effective scenario in cutting pollution. Again though, the OECD model projects slightly over 50 million metric tons of plastic waste being mismanaged annually in 2040. For the accumulation and burning of plastic in the environment to stop, we would have to wait another two decades.

A simulation conducted in 2023 set an even more ambitious target for eliminating plastic pollution by 2040. In it, a cap on production was an essential element alongside 15 other global policy measures which could cut annual mismanaged plastic waste by 90% and virgin plastic use by 30% yearly by 2040, compared with 2019. This would represent a 60% reduction relative to 2040 levels without restrictions on production.

The 40% reduction target floated in Ottawa is generally consistent with what these models suggest is necessary to substantially reduce plastic pollution in coming decades. Whether such a production cap is plausible however is still poorly understood. With plastic production still increasing, it is unclear what policies would reduce it so steeply in just 15 years—and what their side effects might be.

What will it take?

Reducing plastic production would require marked shifts in our lives for which there is little precedent. It could involve massive changes in how we behave as consumers, how products are designed and delivered to us—and so on.

A 40% production cut would probably entail slashing the amount of packaging and single-use plastic made worldwide. These shortlived products account for around half of all plastic production and become waste quickly. Essentially, this would reverse the trend in material use since the mid-20th century.

Every year without production caps makes the necessary cut to plastic production in future steeper—and our need to use other measures to address the problem greater.

Modeling the mess

The combination of policy and technical innovation necessary to eliminate plastic pollution is highly debated. But swingeing production cuts feature in all modeled scenarios.

A less dynamic pace of change is assumed to be necessary for "downstream" measures—those associated with when plastic becomes waste, such as during disposal and recycling.

Some of the emphasis on production caps in models originates from the failure of existing waste management services to stop plastic from entering the environment or being burned outdoors.

Since between 1.7 and 2.5 billion people still lack waste collection, some form of reduction in the amount of new plastic made each year might seem attractive—and consistent with the idea of a circular economy and the waste hierarchy, which prioritizes waste prevention.

Research I worked on recently showed that a country's waste management performance is strongly linked to its socioeconomic development. The collection, recycling and disposal of plastic will only prevail as a solution to the extent that countries improve socioeconomically. Clearly, without radical change, the pace of progress on this front would not solve plastic pollution by 2040.

What is ironic, and illustrative of how daunting the challenge is, is that deploying sound waste management to the under-serviced is one of the few solutions that we understand relatively well, based as it is on commercially and technically proven technologies and operational systems.

By contrast, the three models offer only generic insight into what would be necessary to scale down plastic production. Replacing plastic with paper and card would not fundamentally improve matters if this packaging still ended up as waste being burned in the open.

There are other options, though. It could be possible to massively simplify the types of polymers used in packaging so that just a few are in circulation. This would make recycling more effective, as one of the present complications is the huge variation in materials that leads to cross-contamination. Likewise, countries could massively expand systems for reusing and refilling containers in shops.

No matter the degree, pathway and pace of plastic production cuts, a fundamental change in our relationship with plastic is necessary. As a target, 2040 seems impossibly close for a viable pathway to significantly lower production, but that should not stop us entertaining such a future. It should alert us to the scientific advances and innovation necessary to make it more plausible.

Let us think of it as a worthy investment of our resources and effort—one that we rely upon for a better future.

Author: Costas Velis

This article is republished from  THE CONVERSATION under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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'Everywhere we looked, we found evidence': Microplastics expert on 20 years of pollution research

Thirty years ago, while counting barnacles, limpets and seaweeds along rocky shores, I started noticing a daily tide of litter, mostly plastic. As a marine biology Ph.D. student at Liverpool University, I kept removing it, but the next day, there'd be more.

I'm now a leading international expert on microplastics, a term I coined on May 7, 2004, to describe fragments of plastic measuring as small as a millionth of a meter. As I work to help reduce the grip of plastic pollution on our planet, the solutions are clear to me.

Regulators, governments and citizens all urgently need to turn off the tide of plastic pollution at its source by reducing the production of plastics. But having just returned from the UN global plastics treaty negotiations in Ottawa, Canada, it's frustrating to see the lack of consensus among nations about how to address this global problem.

Disturbed by the scale of the plastic contamination I first noticed on that beach in 1993, I felt compelled to act. I recruited students and the local community to help with the annual Marine Conservation Society's beach clean. We recorded what we found on printed templates.

Back then, a new tool was just becoming available for data compilation: the Excel spreadsheet. The budding scientist within drove me to tabulate what we removed, based on the categories on the printed templates that included bottles, bags, rope and netting.

Suddenly, it struck me that the most numerous items had no category. Fragments of larger plastic items, which appeared by far the most numerous were not being recorded. I got curious and wondered what the smallest plastic pieces on the shore were.

When I began teaching a few years later, I challenged my students to find the smallest pieces of plastic on the beach. Looking among the sand grains, there they were—tiny blue and red fibers and fragments.

An almost forensic journey ensued to confirm their identity. In collaboration with a polymer chemist, we confirmed the tiny fragments were common plastic polymers—polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC)— that presumably formed via mechanical degradation and were accumulating as fragments smaller than the grains of sand themselves.

I was hooked on discovering more about this new form of contamination. Working initially with postgraduate students at the University of Plymouth where I was lecturing, we found that these pieces were common on the shore and in seabed mud and we showed they were eaten by marine life.

Most alarmingly, we used archived samples of plankton that had been collected decades previously to demonstrate that the abundance of microplastics had increased significantly since the 1960s and 1970s.

I pulled together nearly a decade of this research into a one-page summary titled "Lost at sea: where is all the plastic?" That paper, published in the journal Science 20 years ago, was the first to use the term microplastics in this context. Within a couple of weeks, this became a worldwide news story.

Everyone wanted to know whether microplastics were harmful. I set out to establish the wider distribution and determine whether they might be harmful to humans and wildlife.

Despite huge media and policy interest, funding was a challenge. One anonymous reviewer commented that there will never be enough plastic in the oceans to cause the sort of harm Thompson wants to investigate.

Over the years that followed, my team and I showed that microplastics were common on shorelines worldwide, they were abundant in the deep sea, in Arctic sea ice and in multiple species of fish. They weren't just polluting marine environments. They were present in rivers and snow from near the summit of Mount Everest. Everywhere we looked, we found evidence of microplastics.

By 2008, the term microplastic was highlighted by the EU's flagship marine strategy framework directive, a policy introduced to maintain clean, healthy, productive and resilient marine ecosystems. It stipulated that "the quantities of plastic and microplastic should not cause harm in the marine environment."

We demonstrated that, if ingested, microplastics could transfer from the gut to the circulatory system of mussels and that nanoparticles could pass through the bodies of scallops within a matter of hours. We demonstrated the potential for chemical transfer to wildlife and confirmed that the presence of microplastics could have negative consequences, reducing the ability of organisms to put on weight.

A UK parliamentary environmental audit committee requested a special report on microplastics in 2016. I was called to give evidence, and perhaps prompted by comments from my colleagues, MP Mary Creagh referred to me as the "godfather of microplastics" and so it entered the public record.

There are now thousands of studies on microplastics published by researchers worldwide. Policy interventions resulting from this work include the UK ban on plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics, and EU legislation to prohibit intentional addition of microplastics to products which could prevent hundreds of thousands of metric tons of microplastics entering the environment.

However, the largest source of microplastics is the fragmentation of larger items in the environment. So ultimately, we need to take action to reduce the production of a wider range of plastic products than just those containing microplastics.

Without action, plastic production could triple by 2060. Yet, some nations seem set on a path to increase production rather than reduce it.

Treaty negotiations

Last week, I was in Ottawa where 180 nations debated the content of the global plastic pollution treaty, a text that contains more than 60 references to microplastics.

What can be done to halt this accumulation? Microplastics are almost impossible to remove. Even for larger items, clean up won't solve the problem. Novel materials such as biodegradable plastics may offer benefits in specific circumstances but won't solve plastic pollution.

I left the negotiations with mixed emotions. Pleased that the scientific community had delivered sufficient hard evidence—including some of my own research—on plastic pollution to initiate the need for this global treaty. Saddened that 180 nations found it so hard to reach a consensus on the way forward. Negotiations failed to stipulate that independent scientists should even be included in formal expert working groups.

Like many scientists who helped deliver the evidence of harm, it's immensely frustrating to potentially be sidelined from an international process that hopes to deliver solutions. It may be hard for some to swallow—I saw one delegate holding a single-use plastic water bottle behind his back during negotiations. Contrary to the outcome of those midnight discussions in Ottawa, the focus must be on prevention by reducing global production of plastic polymers and ensuring any plastic items we do produce are essential, safe and sustainable.

Author: Richard Thompson

This article is republished from THE CONVERSATION under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.