What should we do to fight plastic pollution, Anna Petrig?
Text: Anna Petrig
Plastic waste is a global problem. An environmental scientist and an expert in international law on the actions that can be taken by private individuals and by policymakers.
Plastic production has soared from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 390 million tons in 2021. Every single minute, the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic ends up in the oceans – not only polluting coastal areas but increasingly turning the deep seabed into a dumping ground.
With increasing awareness of the threat of plastic pollution and its devastating impacts on both nature and people, pressure is mounting on states and international organizations to take legal action. In light of the global scale of the plastic problem, which affects all countries in the world and transcends national borders, there is an obvious need for global rules that allow for a coordinated approach.
While in recent years, global efforts to bolster the legal framework against plastic pollution have multiplied and intensified – notably within various United Nations (UN) fora – a treaty specifically dedicated to plastic pollution does not yet exist. Whereas various environmental treaties address plastic pollution, including the Basel Convention on waste management, they do not cover the whole lifecycle of plastics. It is against this backdrop that more than 2.2 million people from all over the world have signed the largest petition of the WWF ever, requesting the UN to tackle the plastic crisis through a global, legally binding and specifically dedicated agreement on plastic pollution.
Initiatives such as this provided momentum for a landmark decision taken on 2 March 2022: On that day, the 175 countries participating in the UN Environment Assembly – the world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment – unanimously adopted the resolution End Plastic Pollution: Towards an International Legally Binding Instrument. The resolution requested the start of negotiations on the future Plastic Treaty as early as 2022 and set out key priorities that the treaty should address.
Most notably, the instrument shall be based on a full lifecycle approach to plastics, meaning that it should cover the entire cycle from raw material extraction and processing, design, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, use and reuse, to end of life management, including segregation, collection, sorting, recycling and disposal. Another priority is financial and technical assistance as well as capacity-building and technology transfer, which shall benefit those countries that lack the resources to tackle this problem on their own.
The ambition of states participating in the negotiations is to adopt the UN Plastic Treaty by the end of 2024. The first round of negotiations was held from 28 November to 2 December 2022 in Uruguay. A major issue was the scope of the treaty; while a number of oil and plastic-producing countries argued in favor of a narrow treaty mainly dealing with plastic litter, the majority of countries expressed preference for a comprehensive approach addressing the full lifecycle of plastics. The challenge for future rounds of negotiations, the next of which will take place in Paris in May 2023, will be to find legal solutions that match the scale of the plastic pollution problem. If nothing changes, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.
Anna Petrig is Professor of International Law and Public Law at the University of Basel. She is an expert in the law of the sea and a member of the “Plastics Treaty Legal Advisory Service”, which provides legal advice to Least Developed Countries (LDC) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the ongoing Plastic Treaty negotiations.
More article in this issue of UNI NOVA (May 2023).