The day after INC-5 closed with no Treaty signed a delegate from a petro-state stated: “If you address plastic pollution, there should be no problem with producing plastics, because the problem is the pollution, not the plastics themselves.”
This statement seems intuitively true, plastic pollution is an issue, and plastics alone don’t cause problems – they’re just a type of material. The delegate was essentially saying that if we stop polluting, we will not have a problem producing more plastic. But is this true?
First let’s define what we mean by ‘Plastic Pollution’. In its simplest form pollution means:
The introduction of contaminants that cause adverse change
– PFN Plastics Expert
And so, we can define plastic pollution as:
The introduction of plastic contaminants into the environment that cause the release of compounds across the plastic’s lifecycle – from the emissions in the manufacturing phase, to additives transmission in use phase.
Just looking at the definitions we can see that plastic pollution is really a symptom of other problems – it is an effect of other causes – and so to address it, as the article implies, you have to address its cause.
What causes plastic pollution?
Searching around for answers to this question I found a lot of articles citing ‘single use plastic’, ‘microplastics’, ‘car tyres’, and ‘industrial activities’. However, these are all types of plastic, types of pollution, and the argument the person in the article was making is that it is not the plastic that is the problem, rather what happens to that plastic.
By which they mean the problem is the ‘waste management systems’ that are, or are not, in place to deal with the plastic. Waste management systems are what countries and organisations use to collect and manage products or materials once they become waste.
For the sake of this article the waste we’re talking about is plastic, so we’ll say ‘plastic waste management systems’. These systems include but are not limited to:
- Landfill
- Energy recovery incineration centers
- Reuse centres
- Waste trade
- Mechanical recycling
- Chemical recycling
So, this leads us to our next question:
Is waste management enough to solve plastic pollution?
If we were to improve our plastic waste management systems exclusively, would we be able to manage all the plastic waste we produce today?
Fortunately, Breaking the Plastic Wave, a study conducted in 2020 by the Pew Charitable Trust and SystemIQ – in collaboration with many experts (including our own co-CEO Julien Boucher) – analysed, in part, precisely this question.
They started by understanding what ‘business as usual’ (BAU) would look like – if current trends in plastic production and waste management continued without change what would the amount of plastic pollution look like in 2040? In this case their analysis they say plastic pollution means how many ‘million metric tons of plastic leakage (enters) into the ocean per year’. The results are shown below.
This shows, as I think the folks who were quoted in the original article would agree, that something does have to change. It shows we are going to more than double the amount of waste that is mismanaged (from 91 to 239 million tons) and while our capacity for managing waste will increase, it won’t nearly be enough.
The report then goes on to look at whether ‘single-solution strategies’ can stop plastic pollution. Strategies such as recycling, reduction, and substitution of plastic. These are the kind of waste management systems that I think the petro-state delegate in the original article was thinking of.
These particular ‘single-solution strategies’ are quite broad, they’re asking whether ‘recycling’ alone could solve the problem, or whether ‘improved collection and disposal’ could solve the problem.
Baked into these strategies are a lot of assumptions about what ‘recycling better’ means and how quickly they can be implemented. In reality these solutions are complex and are unlikely to meet the more idyllic scenarios described in the report as quickly as their trend lines start.
Still, as you can see from the graph above, each individual strategy does a significant amount of work to reduce plastic pollution but isn’t enough.
You’ll notice on the above graph that the ‘System Change’ line is the most effective. The ‘System Change’ scenario is the focus of entire report and is the aggregation of 8 different strategies:
- Reduce growth in plastic consumption
- Substitute plastic with paper and compostable materials
- Design products and packaging to be more recyclable
- Scale up collection rates of plastic waste
- Double mechanical recycling capacity
- Develop plastic-to-plastic conversion technologies
- Dispose properly and securely the plastic that can not be economically recycled
- Reduce waste exports into other countries.
The report gives a lot of statistics about how good implementing all of these strategies would be for the environment, for the climate, and even for governments, but to get back to the petro-state’s point, it’s still not enough to completely solve the problem. Look at this graph:
It says that even if we were able to implement all of these broad strategies in the ‘system change scenario’ together, it still wouldn’t be enough to completely solve the problem (aka reducing leakage to zero):
Now, you might be thinking, how can this be true? Surely if we ramped up and implemented waste management systems everywhere, gave them more capacity, and scaled them up, we’d be able to solve this.
Effectively this is asking, how much investment would it take to make plastic waste management systems enough to halt plastic pollution. Because for example the report’s scenario doubles mechanical recycling and you might be thinking, why not triple it?
Well, according to the “Policy Scenarios for Eliminating Plastic Pollution by 2040” report by the OECD, there are several reasons:
- Scaling plastic production: Plastic production is projected to increase by 70% by 2040. The sheer volume of plastic waste would greatly overwhelm current systems, and it would be practical impossible to scale plastic waste management systems at the same rate.
- Systemic Leakage: The reality is that waste management systems are not foolproof. Particularly in low- and middle-income countries where infrastructure is limited – there is always mismanaged waste that leaks into the environment.
And not just necessarily as post-consumer waste but in the supply chain, in the manufacturing, processing, transportation, and storage of plastics.
- Microplastic Generation: So far, no plastic waste management system can address the degradation of plastics into microplastics during use or after disposal. And according the ‘Breaking the Plastic Wave’ again, microplastics represent about 60% of all leakage from high-income countries.
Which brings us to our final question:
What’s the answer?
If plastic waste management isn’t enough to stop the business-as-usual prediction, the next logical answer is to change the business-as-usual prediction. The Breaking the Plastic Wave report cites the following as drivers of the business-as-usual prediction:
“Continued population growth; rising per capita plastic use – driven in part by the increasing production of cheap virgin plastic – shifts to low-value/nonrecyclable materials; and the growing share of plastic consumption occurring in countries with low rates of collection.
Under BAU, total plastic waste generation could increase by a factor of two by 2040, and approximately 4 billion people are likely to be without organized waste collection services.
With waste infrastructure unable to keep up with this exponential growth, plastic waste is expected to increase from 91 million metric tons in 2016 to 239 million metric tons by 2040 (see Figure 1).”
This says to me that the solutions are 1. to decouple plastic consumption from population and GDP growth – an issue that goes way beyond the scope of this fact check – 2. reducing per capita plastic use, and 3. improving plastic waste management systems like collection rates and shifting to recyclable materials.
Since we’ve established that even improving all plastic waste management systems together wouldn’t take care of 20% of the problem, the only route left is to reduce per capita plastic use.
In plain English this means either changing consumer behaviour to use less plastic or reducing the production of plastic all together.
For the sake of this article, given that ‘Reduce growth in plastic consumption to avoid nearly one-third of projected plastic waste generation’ is already considered in the ‘system change’ scenario I’ll say it is already well accounted for.
Meaning the only, and in fact, best solution left to reduce plastic pollution would be to strategically reduce plastic production by at least the 90 million tons not accounted for in the ‘System Change’ scenario.
And of course the best way to reduce production is through policy. Companies are going to keep producing plastic as long they can if it makes them money. Fortunately, the statement in question was made by a Saudi Arabian delegate who is in prime position to influence in favour of these sorts of policy changes. Good luck to him.
Conclusion
The fact is: if you address plastic pollution, there is a problem with producing plastics, because the problem is the pollution, which is in part caused by the production of plastics themselves,”
