The war on plastic is a war on modern life

Global talks to reduce the world’s production of plastics collapsed earlier this month. Held under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the talks were originally convened in 2022 and have failed to reach an agreement on five previous occasions. The latest and sixth round of discussions, held in Geneva, Switzerland, proved no more fruitful.

EU member states, the UK, Pacific Islanders and others, forming a bloc of about 100 out of about 170 state participants, were insisting on mandatory national limits to the output of plastic. This bloc was opposed by those nations big in petrochemicals, including the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Instead of limiting production of plastic, they advocated more recycling. Neither side could find a way beyond the impasse.

Plastic waste is clearly a problem. By 2019, a hefty 109million tonnes (Mt) of plastic had accumulated in the world’s rivers, and 30Mt in oceans. In that year, too, 6.1Mt of plastic waste leaked into aquatic environments, of which 1.7Mt went into the seas. As a result, plastic is to be found inside some aquatic creatures, and some land animals as well.

Human bodies and brains are likely vulnerable, too. Not to macroplastics, which include plastic packaging and account for nearly 90 per cent of general plastic leakages, but to microplastics, smaller than five millimetres in diameter.

As it stands, over half of general plastic waste ends up in landfills, where it degrades over centuries, leaking microplastics and potentially toxic chemicals into the soil. Another 19 per cent is incinerated, often in facilities that lack the right filters. The remaining 22 per cent is ‘mismanaged’ – that is, it is simply dumped somewhere or burned in open pits. This especially happens in poor countries.

The problem of waste plastic is getting worse. Between 2000 and 2019, the world’s annual generation of general plastic waste more than doubled, from 156Mt to 353Mt. The amount of plastic-packaging waste also doubled from 71Mt to 142Mt, a figure that could double again by the late 2040s. Moreover, between now and then, plastic waste will increase even faster through the widespread use of plastics in construction and, especially, motor vehicles.

It’s a problem that asks serious questions of nation states. Yet the UN talks have not come close to providing an answer. The proposal from US, Russia, Saudi Arabia et al to recycle more plastic waste is unlikely to make a significant difference. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reckons that the world might be able to recycle 17 per cent of its plastic by 2060.

But the idea put forward by the UK and the EU – that we should try to reduce output of plastic at source – is far more damaging. Indeed, worldwide production quotas for plastic, had they been agreed at Geneva, would have cost countless jobs around the world and forced the price of plastic to rise.

Of course, for Europe’s virtue-signalling elites and their NGO hangers-on, a massive price hike in plastics is good news. They see plastic packaging in particular as a symbol of a ‘throwaway’ society, of Western masses’ supposedly mindless consumerism and their dependence on petrostates. So anything that limits people’s consumption is seen by them as a good thing – even if it also affects the living standards of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, too.

Indeed, plastic-production quotas would hinder the development of large swathes of the globe. They would certainly limit poorer countries from urbanising and modernising (1).

What unites advocates of production quotas and fans of recycling is their tendency to ignore the world-changing benefits of plastic, and the continued potential to innovate further in plastic products and components.

Seeing plastic merely as waste, its critics ignore what it has done not just for construction and vehicles, but also for textiles, consumer products, electrical wiring, electronic components and medicine (plastic surgery, syringes and tubes, packaging of pharmaceuticals). When so many pipes in Africa need to move from rusty metal to plastic, critics don’t want to know. Moreover, many of the world’s most pathbreaking designs in furniture and other goods continue to be made in plastic.

At the same time, technological solutions to the problem of plastic waste are showing real promise. AI has already begun to improve the sorting of plastic waste. Similarly, attaching radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to plastic packaging could allow for more reliable separation of different kinds of packaging waste.

There are high-tech efforts underway to begin cleaning up our waterways. Perhaps 80 per cent of the plastic pollution in our oceans originates in fewer than 1,700 rivers – with the Philippines, India, Malaysia, China and Indonesia leading the rather dismal field. Collecting plastic waste from rivers is likely to be far easier than cleaning the oceans. The Dutch innovator Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup organisation, working with Kone Cranes, has already developed floating vessels to do this work.

Plastic can also be broken down. Scores of fungal and bacterial strains have been found to be capable of breaking down polycaprolactone (PCL), a biodegradable polyester commonly used in the production of various polyurethanes. And SeaClear, an EU-funded project, is using teams of robots to scoop up litter, including plastics, from ocean floors.

After the latest collapse of the years-long plastic-waste talks this month, there is still grounds for optimism. Instead of trying to turn back the clock on modernity, and limit plastic production, or embarking on the Sisyphean task of more and more recycling, we need more innovation, more research and development. With the right approach, plastic waste is far from an insoluble problem. To abandon or limit our use of plastic would be short-sighted in the extreme.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen

(1) The world market for plastic is set to expand fast, from about $375 billion in 2022 to perhaps more than $500 billion in 2030. The OECD reckons that, between 2019 and 2060, the use of plastics in packs will more than double: it will do that for polypropylene (PP), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), while the use of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is set to triple.