Plastic waste leaking into oceans will triple by 2040. Even if all existing government and industry commitments are met this will reduce by just 7%. What's missing?
We're on course to have more plastic in our oceans than fish. Plastic trash is found in the guts of more than 90% of the world’s sea birds and in the stomachs of more than half of the world’s sea turtles.
In the absence of formal infrastructure and waste collection supply chains, there has risen a global informal trash economy that employs tens of millions of people, trapping them in cyclical intergenerational poverty.
The average human being consumes a credit card worth of plastic every week. Plastics often contain harmful chemical additives that are potentially carcinogenic and pose various hormonal health issues, while microplastics are becoming impossible to avoid.
Each of us have multiple roles to play. Governments, packaged goods companies, consumers, and innovators need to come together for investment across the plastic value chain.
By some estimates, the majority of plastic in our oceans were used for just 15 minutes before being discarded. We need to focus on reducing use and throw consumption.
Some types of plastic like PET, metal, cardboard, glass, and biodegradable alternatives are much better suited for an environmentally sustainable end of life.
Over the last few decades, millions of tonnes of plastic waste has been shipped to countries in the Global South who lack the regulations and the infrastructure for ethical processing.
In order to create genuinely holistic long-term solutions, we need collection systems to capture plastic before it leaks into nature. This is the biggest gap in the plastic value chain.
Less than 9% of plastic waste is recycled even though the solutions exist because we lack critical infrastructure and adequate investment in end of life innovation.
Governments need to enforce more stringent packaging reduction and recovery requirements, while also creating systems to help nations being inequitably affected.
With extensive research into the topic by academics and think tanks, the results are clear - we need to take urgent action across a broad spectrum of plastic reduction, substitution, recovery, and recycling initiatives to truly reach a circular economy.
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