Global plastic treaty

In mid-November last year (2023), the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC-3) convened its third meeting in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Delegates from more than 160 countries attended. Earlier, two other similar meetings were held in Uruguay and France. The fourth meeting (INC-4) is scheduled to be held in Ottawa, Canada between April 23 and 29. The objective of the INC meets is to develop a legally bound instrument to address the problem of plastic pollution. The negotiations are expected to be completed by the end of this year towards reaching a global plastic treaty.

Plastic pollution is a growing concern because the world is producing more plastic than it can deal with. Most at risk are the less wealthy countries of Asia and Africa because they have little or no garbage collection and recycling facilities.

While plastics are being considered an environmental hazard, one cannot also forget how this synthetic material developed in early 20th century from fossil fuel has contributed immensely to the advancement of every branch of science and industry. But then how could it turn into a hazard to life and environment? To be frank, it happened when it became too cheap as a packaging material and people started to throw it away immediately after use. It is the single-use plastic that brought about the throwaway culture. The single-use plastics of packaging material are clogging every channel from a city's sewers to canals to rivers to even oceans. The throwaway habit is basically evolutionary in the animal kingdom. But the problem is that plastics are unlike the disposable natural objects like banana peel or similar outer coverings of other fruits that do not harm environment as they can be broken down by bacteria and absorbed by soil. Unfortunately, plastics, in that sense, are practically indestructible. They may exist for hundreds of years. In other words, it is our old habit with the new substance that is incompatible and the root of all evil!

According to an estimate, every year 8.0 million tons of plastic garbage enters the world's oceans from the littoral countries. An estimate says, if bags filled with that amount of plastic garbage could be placed along the shorelines of the oceans, then every foot of the shoreline would have five such garbage bags!

There is yet another problem with plastics. It is that they can gradually break into smaller particles less than half a centimetre in width. But these are still not biodegradable. As a result, they float about everywhere on earth, its air, mountains, deep into its oceans, into the alimentary canals of birds, fishes, turtles, whales, you name it. As they cannot be absorbed, they can at least block the passage of food in the stomach, flow of blood in the veins. When in still smaller parts, the so-called microfibres and, still smaller, nanofibres, they become unstoppable. They can then become part of the food chain undetected.

But again, it is not the substance itself under scrutiny that is mainly to blame for the new environmental hazard we are witnessing. All are now eating and drinking microplastic and plastic nanofibres. If the throwaway culture involving single-use plastics is not controlled, it would at a stage kill us as well as other animals.

So, what is the way out?  Recycling is obviously one of the answers to the problem as it can at least reduce production of plastics to some extent. But unlike glass, paper, iron and aluminium that were in common use during first half of the 20th century, plastics have hardly any recovery value. That is why as scrap material it cannot be compared to other recyclable materials containing natural substances. It is not commercially viable. Thus recycling of plastic scraps is generally subsidised through various deposit schemes under government regulations. This is how recycled plastics are made to cost below that of the raw materials they constitute. But, again, recycled plastics need properly disposed of scraps. This calls for a well-organised system through which used plastics are disposed of and not thrown away. Such plastic garbage is collected and recycled. But what about plastics thrown away indiscriminately?

It is exactly here that the work of managing plastic pollution should start from. The focus should be on controlling the habit of improper disposal. However, penalising the end users, the public, is often difficult, but it is possible to impose higher fees on the producers of single-use plastics such as shopping bags and foamed food containers or some may even be banned.

In this connection, there are the so-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes. Under this system, manufacturers of some of the plastic items create the infrastructure to take back and recycle their products.

The proposed draft at the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC) includes provisions that would address pollution issue at all stages of the plastic value chain from primary plastic polymers to waste management.

But though member states were at one about tackling global plastic pollution with a life cycle approach, they could not agree on where the cycle should start. In fact, the best way to address it is to stop it at the source, the polymer production stage. Arguing that plastics have an important role in the economy, many stakeholders have stressed controlling the issue at the level where plastics become a pollutant. 

Hopefully, the envisaged global plastic treaty would accommodate all the challenges of meaningfully fighting its pollution.

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