According to the United Nations, plastic production increased from 2 million tons in 1950 to about 400 million in 2024. This number is expected to triple by 2060. Currently, only 10 percent of this plastic is recycled and reused. The rest will remain in our environment for centuries, polluting the planet, from the oceans to the mountains, contaminating food chains and the human body, where there is a risk of damage to our organs and brains.
In 2025 we will begin to put an end to plastic pollution. Since 2022, political decision-makers in the United Nations, representing over 170 countries, have been negotiating a legally binding decision Global Plastics Treaty This is about the entire life cycle of plastics, from design to production to disposal. This Treaty shares many of the mechanisms contained in the Treaty Montreal Protocol of 1987which ultimately led to the phase-out of CFCs, the chemicals responsible for ozone depletion. Therefore, it can be just as successful despite resistance.
The contract should be finalized by the fifth and final meeting at the end of November 2024 in Busan, South Korea. Until now, it was perhaps unsurprising that The negotiations were polarized. At the time of writing, the draft treaty contains two options regarding its overall goal: the first, more ambitious, aims to “end plastic pollution”; the second, on the other hand, aims to “protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution.”
The first option is defended by a group of countries that are part of the Ambitious coalition to end plastic pollutionled by the Nordic countries, but also by countries such as Rwanda and Peru. Option two is favored by major oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, which want to shift the focus of discussions to plastic recycling and waste management rather than production. In August 2024, the United States, also a major plastics and oil producer, announced a surprising policy shift by committing to also supporting restrictions on plastic production. Given the influence of the Americans, this new position will have an impact on the treaty.
Agreeing on option one would put us on a path very similar to that of the Montreal Protocol. While it is unlikely at this point that the treaty will set concrete binding targets for phasing out plastic production, it would undeniably set the ambitious goal of ending plastic pollution. On the other hand, option two (“protecting human health and the environment”) is a terribly vague goal, partly because we don’t know exactly what the threshold for human health impacts is, and perhaps we haven’t for some time don’t know for a very long time.
Regardless, the two options represent progress. Both provide the plastics industry with the guidance it needs to develop better technologies. Option one, for example, would inspire companies to develop alternatives such as fully biodegradable and compostable materials that will ultimately replace plastic (particularly single-use plastics such as shopping bags and plastic packaging, which now account for 35 percent of plastic consumption). Option two would likely require industry to develop more efficient methods of reducing the waste stream, such as improved recycling processes.
This technology control is perhaps the most important aspect of the contract. For example, the original Montreal Protocol of 1987 set very conservative gradual reduction targets for reducing CFC production: 20 percent by 1994 and then 50 percent by 1998. These were considered at the time to be far too slow for the requirements to address the problem. Crucially, the Protocol also explicitly stated that such objectives would be re-examined as new scientific and alternative technologies became available. This put pressure on the industry to develop technological solutions as companies competed to develop better products. In the end, these alternatives – like hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which could be used in refrigeration with much less impact on the ozone layer – developed so much faster than expected that countries met again just three years later to discuss the phase-out of this substance to some complete use of CFCs by the year 2000.
In 2025, the Global Plastics Treaty will send a clear signal to the plastics industry that it must change the way it does business. This will be the beginning of the end for plastic.