Global Plastics Treaty: How are governments trying to fix the plastic pollution crisis?
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The National
14 hours ago
- The National
We must get the ball rolling on how we deal with microplastics
Each week, as a result of what we drink, eat, breathe and rub up against, we ingest and absorb about five grams of plastic a week. Hilariously, that's a credit card's worth of microplastics. So you'll be glad to hear that there's a Global Plastics Treaty currently thundering to a conclusion in Geneva, this coming Thursday. It's the usual diplomatic car-crash of concerned (and unconcerned) governments, industry lobbyists and NGOs 'observing' the process. READ MORE: UK imports of Israeli fruit and veg increase as Gazans die of starvation There's a phalanx of studies gathered together in a recent paper from the leading medical journal The Lancet. It shows that pervasive micro- and nano-plastics (MNPs) in our environment are as much a health as a pollution issue. Tiny fragments of plastic suffusing our systems are disrupting pregnancies, making us stupider, shrinking male genitals, triggering inflammation that leads to cancer, cirrhosis, strokes… (Want more alarming brain news, as reported by The New York Times's David Wallace-Wells? Due to a build-up of MNPs by 50% in the past eight years, we may have the equivalent of a full plastic spoon resting in our neural tissues. This may explain a lot.) The toxic elements in plastics causing these ailments are released, as the manufactured objects degrade in our environment. Current trends (unless they change) show plastics tripling in production by 2060. This means we're laying in a 'time-bomb' of toxic sources, ready to damage our children in their future. We already have the imagery for plastics as pollutants of nature. The birds that crunch when you squeeze them, because they're so full of plastic fragments. MNPs pervade the foam of sea waves, the clouds topping Japanese mountains, the very breath of dolphins (true). Go to the deepest reaches of the ocean, and there you'll find a floating supermarket bag in the Mariana Trench. Going by all these accounts, it's not so much that we should urge the eco-crats to get it together next week – though please do, fellow humans – as that we should take a pause to wonder at our cracked and caked condition. As we are told that plastics invade both our most remote and our most intimate spaces, it's certainly hammering home the 'unthinkable harm we have done to the planet', as the Irish tech writer Mark O'Connell puts it. 'This is now being visited, in this surreal and lurid manner, on our own bodies,' he continues. 'We're having a final communion with our own garbage.' READ MORE: 'Double-edged': Gianmarco Soresi on identity, Israel, and his sold-out Fringe run O'Connell invokes Sigmund Freud's idea of repressed emotions. Because they've been pushed down, they return to us evergreen and eternal, 'unalterable by time', wreaking their bad effects on us. 'Is this not what is going on with microplastics?' he suggests. 'We can throw it away, we can fool ourselves into thinking we're 'recycling' it, but it will not absent itself. It will show up again, in the food we eat and the water we drink. 'It will haunt the milk that infants suckle from their mothers' breasts. Like a repressed memory, it remains, unalterable by time.' Wallace-Wells notes that 'whole environmental movements of the past have been built on fears of incipient contamination… But what are the lessons when pollution is seemingly everywhere, and in everyone, already?' To answer both viewpoints requires action at different scales, both personal and systemic. There are plenty of head-bending lists of how to reduce the plastic in your biological life – head-bending because it seems practically impossible to reduce it much. One Washington Post piece (from a microplastics academic expert) suggests you cut out microwaving food in plastic bowls; stop using black plastic ladles or non-stick pans; move to a plant-based diet (microplastics linger longer in large animals, so don't eat them); eschew any wrapped or processed food… You'll note the overlap between minimising your MNPs, and the diet prescriptions from the more urgent climate science reports. When the same advice comes from two different scientifically credible sources, we should maybe pay more attention. So even if you want to limit your response to self-help, the bigger systemic question inevitably arises. If it's likely that our plasticised society is incrementally disordering and disrupting us and our nature, then what kind of revolution in the conduct of our lives does that imply? For example, imagine the upheaval if we start to say: where we currently see plastic, replace them with wood, glass, clay, steel, bamboo? There's a revival and reshaping of craft production/retail implied in this response – the opposite of 'cash-to-trash' purchasing. How do we financially enable the non-affluent to join the middle classes, in surrounding themselves with non-toxic, non-throwaway, long-lasting items? How can we and our food system puncture our wobbling, consumerist complacencies, and imagine supermarkets where no single-use plastic wrapping is involved? We have to think this through, integrating several sectors. For one thing, we need more time and space, in our whole lives, so that we can relate to our consumptions in this conscious way – to shop and cook mindfully and carefully. This implicates how we deploy the AIs and automatons currently advancing upon us. Time, space and materials are required socially, so we can begin to profoundly clean up our bodies and domesticities. Artificial intelligences should be deployed to grant us those resources. What politics can start to argue for shorter working weeks, and universal basic services/incomes, as the best result of the labour-replacing machines around us? Rather than an even more broken and unhealthy society, cruelly divided between serfs and techno-monarchs? As Oscar Wilde nearly said, the problem with eco-socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. To cope with the legacy of MNPs, we'll need more days and hours reclaimed from work, replaced by forms of healing conviviality. The final news from the science is that microplastics will indeed be a legacy, rather than something we can remedy with advanced medicines. READ MORE: Labour's eviction scandal beggars belief There are no treatments in sight that will be able to remove the amount of microplastics currently in our bodies (though you can take some assurance in the news that more than 90% of MNPs we ingest are excreted). However, a percentage will linger in our tissues, organs and bones for the foreseeable future. Do we let that drive us crazy – go cartwheeling into the world of conspiracy and control, where populist characters like RFK lie in wait? Or might we actually accept our responsibilities and its consequences? The capitalist modernity we've embraced hasn't just wreaked its costs on the planet, but on ourselves and our health also. Any attempt to insulate ourselves from the climate crisis is now surely ludicrous. We can be two kinds of plastic people now. One that bears the traces, in its most intimate folds, of climate disruption. And one that can bend itself out of its conventional, defensive posture, and respond creatively to our planetary emergency. Let the former drive the latter. It seems that plasticles in your testicles needn't be a total disaster, after all.
Gulf Today
a day ago
- Gulf Today
Pressing need for tackling a global plastics crisis
British medical journal The Lancet has warned that there is a need to check the rampant use of plastics and that it is causing harm, including death, to human beings, to animals, in rivers and seas. The journal said, 'Plastics are a grave, growing, under-recognised danger to human and planetary health. Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age.' It also said that the use of plastics is contributing to climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity. It is reckoned that 8,000 mega tonnes pollute the planet as of now. Plastic production is set to triple by 2060, and only less than 10 per cent of it is recycled. The plastics problem is costing world governments $1.5 trillion annually in health costs. The piece carrying the warnings against plastic is part of the campaign that the journal has launched, called, 'The Lancet Countdown on health and plastics.' It coincides with the start of a 175-nation global conference on plastics in Switzerland. The aim of the conference is to forge a Global Plastics Treaty. It is not going to be easy because countries like China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are opposing a ban on plastics, and prefer plastic recycling. Plastic recycling is not a helpful solution with the existing technology because the proportion of recycling is very low, 10 per cent. So, 90 per cent un-recycled plastic hangs ominously over the whole globe, causing immense harm to the health of the population and the ecosystem. The Lancet has expressed the view that the harm cause by plastics is underestimated, and therefore the real extent of harm done by it remains an underestimation. The journal notes, 'Given the considerable gaps of knowledge of plastic chemicals, it is reasonable to conclude that the full extent of these chemicals' harm to health is underestimated and that the burden of disease currently attributed to them is undercounted.' The use of plastic is ubiquitous, and its use across sectors has grown in humongous proportions since the 1950s, from furniture to electronics and electric appliances to furniture at home and in offices, in the packaging industry and medical appliances. So, an effective alternative in place of plastics has to be found if the use of harmful plastics is to be controlled and reduced. The journal argues that the petro-chemical industry is churning out plastic even as the use of fossil fuels is going down. This appears to be quite speculative in the absence of hard data. It would of course be unfair to dismiss the hypothesis out of hand. The journal is also not on firm ground in the solution it offers. It says, 'It is now clear that the world cannot recycle its way out of the plastic pollution crisis. Control of the plastics crisis will require continuing research coupled with the science-driven interventions – laws, policies, monitoring, enforcement, incentives, and innovation.' There is implied that scientific knowledge as it exists now does not offer any ready-made solutions to the plastic crisis. So, government policies banning the use of plastic will of be of little use. It also shows that not all technological breakthroughs are benign. The discovery of plastic and its innumerable uses has now turned out to be a big source of pollution, and a clear danger to the health of people. The topics for research on plastics have to focus on recycling, or find another set of chemicals which can be as protean as the use of chemicals that have given rise to plastics. It is said that 16,000 chemicals are used in the making of plastics. With the evolving AI helping chemical research in developing newer molecules and produce new kind of chemicals than the chemicals that produce plastics.
Reuters
a day ago
- Reuters
Sustainable Switch: US sends memo rejecting global plastics treaty
This is an excerpt of the Sustainable Switch newsletter, where we make sense of companies and governments grappling with climate change, diversity, and human rights on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here. Hello! It's been a while since I last mentioned the Global Plastics Treaty. What better time to bring to everyone's attention than the ongoing negotiations taking place in Switzerland this week. Before we get into the debate on whether life in plastic is fantastic, please note there will not be a Climate Focus newsletter tomorrow, but not to worry, as I will return with all the latest environmental, social and governance news on August 12. Now, back to the plastics of it all. This week, more than 170 countries are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, for the final fortnight of negotiations to debate the terms of the Global Plastics Treaty, a United Nations-backed effort to tackle plastic waste. Click here, opens new tab for a Reuters video on where the talks currently stand. The most divisive issues include capping production, managing plastic products and chemicals of concern, and financing to help developing countries implement the treaty. But before talks could even get started, the United States sent letters to at least a handful of countries urging them to reject the goal of a global pact that includes limits on plastic production and plastic chemical additives, according to a memo and communications seen by Reuters. What did the letter say? In the communications dated July 25 and circulated to countries at the start of negotiations on Monday, the U.S. laid out its red lines for negotiations that put it in direct opposition to over 100 countries that have supported those measures. The U.S. delegation, led by career State Department officials who had represented the Biden administration, sent memos to countries saying it will not agree to a treaty that tackles the upstream of plastic pollution. "We will not support impractical global approaches such as plastic production targets or bans and restrictions on plastic additives or plastic products – that will increase the costs of all plastic products that are used throughout our daily lives," said the memo Reuters understands was sent to countries who could not be named due to sensitivities around the negotiations. The U.S. stance broadly aligns with the positions laid out by the global petrochemicals industry, which stated similar positions ahead of the talks, and a number of powerful oil and petrochemical producer countries that have held this position throughout the negotiations. What did Big Oil say? Speaking of the oil industry, hopes for the ambitious global treaty to curb plastic pollution dimmed even further as delegates told Reuters that oil states, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, plan to challenge key treaty provisions and push for voluntary or national measures. Government spokespeople for Saudi Arabia and Russia were not immediately available for comment. Andres Del Castillo, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a non-profit providing legal counsel to some countries attending the talks, said oil states were questioning even basic facts about the harm to health caused by plastics. "We are in a moment of revisionism, where even science is highly politicized," he said. The petrochemical industry said it continued to support a global treaty and had been urging the U.S. administration and Congress to "lean in" in negotiations. French politician Philippe Bolo, a member of the global Interparliamentary Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, said that a weak, watered-down treaty that focuses on waste management must be avoided. Bolo and a diplomatic source from a country attending the talks said the potential of a vote or even a breakaway agreement among more ambitious countries could be explored, as a last resort. ESG LENS Palm oil supplies to global markets from Indonesia and Malaysia could fall as much as 20% over the next five years, according to Reuters' calculations based on government and industry projections, some previously unpublished. Future output from smallholder farmers may well be over-estimated because the condition of trees and the rate of planting new trees is worse than estimates by the governments in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, according to veteran industry figures Dorab Mistry and M.R. Chandran. That view is backed up by Reuters interviews with more than a dozen farmers and officials in Malaysia. Click here for the full Reuters insight story. Today's Sustainable Switch was edited by Emelia Sithole-Matarise Think your friend or colleague should know about us? Forward this newsletter to them. They can also subscribe here.
