What Will It Take to Solve Our Planet's Plastic Pollution Crisis?

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The world currently produces more than 50 million tonnes of mismanaged" plastic waste each year, and some researchers project this flood of pollution into the environment will double by mid-century. However, they also say that if countries can agree to adopt four key policies during global plastic treaty negotiations this week, we could slash that by 90 per cent.

Plastic pollution ends up clogging ecosystems on land and at sea. This has an impact on every level of the food chain, from phytoplankton cells to humans," says Sarah-Jeanne Royer at the University of California, San Diego. Plastics are also responsible for about 5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

That is why most of the world's countries are meeting in Busan, South Korea, this week to hammer out the final details of a global treaty aimed at ending such pollution. In 2022, 175 countries agreed to develop a legally binding treaty and have spent the past two years debating its requirements, with particular disagreements over setting limits on the production of new plastic.

To bring more clarity to the debate, Douglas McCauley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues used an artificial intelligence model trained on economic data to test how the policies under consideration would affect this pollution globally. I wasn't convinced that [eliminating plastic pollution] was actually possible," says McCauley. But it turns out you can get pretty darn close."

According to their projections, under current conditions, such pollution is set to roughly double to between 100 and 139 million tonnes by 2050. But a combination of four policies, all of which are still on the table in the current treaty draft, were enough to reduce this by more than 90 per cent.

The most impactful was a mandate that plastic products contain at least 40 per cent recycled material. That rule alone cuts plastic pollution in half by mid-century. This effect is so significant because it reduces demand for newly made or virgin" plastic, while also spurring demand for recycled materials, says McCauley. Suddenly there's a giant global market for recycling."

But recycling on its own wasn't sufficient. If your target is to end plastic pollution, you need to do things across the entire life cycle," he says. Deeper cuts required limiting production of virgin plastics to 2020 levels. This cap cuts plastic pollution by around 60 million tonnes per year by the middle of the century, according to the model. This change also had the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production, as extracting fossil fuels and turning them into virgin plastics involves emissions-intensive processes.

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