Breaking our plastics habit is easier said than done

There are alternative sources of energy for coal, gas and oil, but there are few substitutes for polymers.

- David Fickling

Could our unshakeable addiction to plastics be broken?

That's certainly the hope of activists. The US - birthplace of the modern polymers industry, and the biggest producer of its key feedstocks, oil and gas - has joined a bloc supporting a worldwide treaty capping plastics production. That could make a UN meeting in South Korea in November a turning point in the material culture of humanity. The harder challenge will be ensuring that an agreement is workable.

Whichever way you look at it, a mountain of waste polymers is likely to be one of the most lasting monuments of the 21st century. We produce some 400 million tonnes of plastics year in, year out. Except for the roughly 9 per cent that's recycled and 12 per cent that's incinerated, all of it ends up somewhere in the environment, whether in a landfill or scattered through our streets, soil and oceans.

Do everything feasible to stop that runaway train, and we might cut output by about 40 per cent by 2040, according to one influential study. Even such an ambitious scenario would leave more than 10 billion tonnes of waste by mid-century.