Failure of talks for plastic treaty turn focus back to reduce, reuse, recycle

Talks aimed at a global treaty to cut plastic pollution fizzled in Geneva this week, with no agreement to meaningfully reduce the harms to human health and the environment that come with the millions of tons of plastic water bottles, food containers and packaging produced today.

- BY ALEXA ST. JOHN Associated Press

Though as many as 100 countries sought caps on production, powerful oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia and the United States stood against them. They argued the caps were unnecessary and a threat to their economies and industries.

That means any progress continues to depend on efforts to improve recycling, reuse and product design — the very things that powerful nations argued were sufficient to address the problem without resorting to production cuts.

Here’s what to know about how successful those efforts have been.

Just how big is the problem?

The world makes more than 400 million tons of new plastic each year, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that could increase by about 70 percent by 2040 without meaningful change. A great deal of that ends up in landfills or, worse, the environment.

Pollution isn't the only problem. Plastics, made almost entirely from fossil fuels, are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Plastics generated 3.4 percent — or 1.8 billion tons — of planet-warming emissions across the globe in 2019, the United Nations says.

So, how effective has recycling been?

Not very.

It's notoriously difficult to recycle plastics; only six percent of what's made gets recycled, according to the OECD. That's largely because different kinds of plastic cannot be recycled together. They have different chemical compositions, making it costly and time-consuming, and requiring a lot of manual sorting.