Earth Day 2024 “Planet v. Plastic”: What’s at stake as negotiations for the UN Global Plastics Treaty proceed this week.
#TurnOffThePlasticTap © Von Wong Productions
For those of you tired of hearing about plastic, you may be thinking “why is this year’s theme for Earth Day plastic again” (it was also the theme in 2018 at which point plastic was not yet a mainstream issue, relatedly the UN World Oceans Day theme in 2018 was “Clean our Ocean”). You may feel plastic pollution is a micro issue and not the least of our worries as we face the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution of all forms. And yet, why then does plastic production only continue to INCREASE at an exponential rate?
Plastic production is expected to double or even triple by 2050!
The scale of the issue: We are already dumping two garbage truckloads of plastic into the ocean every minute and new studies continue to show the extent to which we are eating, breathing and drinking plastic causing risk of cancer, developmental threats in children, reduced fertility, and most recently heart disease! We are clearly not rising to meet this challenge… yet.
That said, we have hope for the future and this week more than most: world leaders are gathering today in Ottawa to kickoff the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4) to develop the UN Global Plastics Treaty. This treaty is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to collectively define the plastics issue and our global response to enable health, harmony and justice. We need a strong and ambitious treaty! We need to turn off the plastic tap.
Image from Break Free From Plastic march on 21 April 2024 in Ottawa ahead of the INC-4 negotiations.
The Plastic Problem
Here we are in 2024, eight years after the thought-provoking documentary “A Plastic Ocean” (2016) rallied a global response to the immense issue of plastic pollution as both an ecological and public health crisis. Again in 2021, “The Story of Plastic” demonstrates how the entire plastic value chain from extraction of oil & gas to manufacturing to disposal causes human rights issues on a global level. As everything is interconnected, plastic is not an isolated issue. Plastic pollution relates to the fossil fuel industry, relates to climate change and adaptation, relates to human rights and public health, relates to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health.
A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Climate Impact of Primary Plastic Production, shows that primary production of plastic alone releases 4x the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the airline industry (and this is based on 2019 numbers looking only at the first stage of plastic manufacturing)! A summary of this report by international scientists and experts (published by GAIA) extrapolates that even if every other greenhouse gas emitting industry managed to decarbonize this year, at business-as-usual growth rates, the production of primary plastic would completely consume the global carbon budget as early as 2060 and no later than 2083. Further, they conclude that to stay within the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement, primary plastic production must decrease 12-17% annually starting now!
Priorities for the UN Global Plastics Treaty
An independent and diverse global network of concerned scientists and technical experts formed the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. They released a direct response to the revised Zero Draft of the Treaty which is up for negotiation during this INC-4 session. We pull out some key highlights from their review below:
To address plastic pollution within the broader context of interconnected human and planetary threats it is critical to reduce global quantities of plastics produced.
A sector-specific just transition must be guided by principles of prevention, precaution, polluter-pays, and non-regression.
Any assessment framework adopted needs to be applied across the full life cycle of plastics, from the extraction of fossil and bio-based feedstocks for primary plastic polymers (PPP), through to the environmental remediation and compensation of communities affected by pollution.
Learnings from other international treaties (such as the Paris Agreement) demonstrate that globally defined targets are more effective than nationally determined contributions. They recommend a time-bound international legally-binding PPP reduction target with supportive national PPP reduction targets.
A hazard-based approach to plastics is vital. We cannot assume safe levels of hazardous chemicals throughout the plastics life cycle are possible, and we can adopt precedents that exist for a hazard-based approach in other multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs).
The same level of rigor and transparency assessment must be applied to both PPPs as well as potential alternatives to prevent false solutions that create new issues.
Fundamental Conflict of Interest parameters must limit participation by those affiliated with the chemical or plastics industries. We need unbiased guidance.
Specific red flags on terminology and language:
Terms such as ’sustainable alternatives’ are applied but not defined, creating the potential for regrettable substitutions.
A consistent definition of ‘sustainability’ should be applied as integrated in other MEAs to reflect a comprehensive systems approach supported by sustainability assessment criteria that guard against burden shifting and regrettable responses, alternatives and substitutes.
They advise against using terms such as ‘sustainable economic growth’ where assessments of economic growth are not balanced with sustainable societal, human health, and environmental dimensions.
They challenge the use of terms such as 'avoidable' and 'unnecessary,’ which have no precedent in any MEA and are broadly interpreted and therefore difficult to assess. They propose replacing these terms with 'non-essential' taking guidance from the essential use concept in the Montreal Protocol.
Likewise, they challenge the use of the obscure term 'problematic,' proposing instead 'hazardous' and ‘unsustainable’.
As relevant to our work at Anthropogenic on establishing truth, trust, transparency and timeliness to enable a transition to an impact-driven economy:
Robust and comprehensive hazard-based, sustainability, transparency, and essentiality assessments are all dependent on data transparency.
We need to define sophisticated data transparency criteria to establish baselines, inform reduction targets, harmonize safety and sustainability standards, guide effective monitoring and reporting, avoid greenwashing, and establish transparent access to information.
To analyze essentiality criteria and determine ‘non-essential’ items as defined in the Montreal Protocol, there is the need to assess transparency of content, origin, and the safe and sustainable use and end-of-life management.
Comprehensive and harmonized information disclosure mechanisms will play a major role in data transparency. These mechanisms must closely align with the treaty’s objectives, and provide the information necessary for sound decision-making by all stakeholders across the life cycle, from feedstock extraction to environmental remediation. In the current draft, there is a lack of clear linkage between transparency mechanisms and treaty objectives, operational details, non-compliance measures, non-state party provisions, and capacity-building efforts, as well as challenges in harmonizing information disclosure. The next revision of the draft treaty text needs to fill the current gaps to specify reporting modalities and enable the creation of a universally applicable reporting framework.
A truly safe and sustainable economy must integrate all negative externalities to nature and society and ensure competitiveness without resorting to ineffective and similarly harmful fossil fuel subsidies or plastics/carbon credits/offsets.
At Anthro, we go beyond disclosure to monitor, report and verify the actual outcomes with multi-faceted veridical and transparent data inputs. On the runway to the implementation and following continued maintenance of this treaty, there is critical need to closely track reduction targets and all assessments noted above and Anthropogenic's Advanced Impact Intelligence software is well-positioned to engage in that effort.
Take Action
Add your voice to call for a meaningful treaty here: https://lnkd.in/geBEuWXE
We need to take strong and decisive action now to determine our legacy on this Earth. Will we continue to increase production of harmful chemicals that we know are causing human rights and public health threats at every stage in their life cycle? Or will we properly incentivize an industry transition before more damage is done and use our creativity and intuition to find alternatives to the many useful functions plastic has served in our society?
We have only been mass producing fossil-fuel based plastic for the past 60-70 years, so within two generations we have created this global issue. We can reboot traditional practices and improve them with new technologies to meet our future demands! Let's usher in a next generation of systems that enable reuse and refill, systems that inherently value materials repurposed in a closed loop, systems that prioritize localized supply chains. We have the power and ability to secure and sustain Earth and humanity for generations to come.
