Fun to watch map, and UN to reduce plastics

  Another great historical video...

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Plastics: NPR article from Monday, 11.13.23 

"... last year the United Nations set out to write a legally binding agreement to deal with the issue. That decision by U.N. member states "will clearly take us towards a future with no plastic pollution," Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, Japan's then-environment minister, said at the time.

This week, negotiators from around 150 countries are gathering in Kenya to start hashing out the treaty's details. Outside groups are there too, trying to influence the talks, including public health advocates, human rights activists, environmentalists and the oil and gas industry.

Oil and gas companies push recycling

Oil and gas companies have spent decades touting recycling as a solution to the plastic waste problem. Yet reporting reveals they knew that the economics of recycling don't make sense and that recycling wouldn't keep waste from piling up in landfills and the environment. Despite years of advertising campaigns and municipal efforts, less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally.

The problem is that making new plastic is almost always cheaper than collecting and recycling used material. Recycling plastic also requires a lot of energy, and some plastic waste can't be recycled at all, says Bethanie Carney Almroth, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Yet the idea of a circular economy for plastic — using, recycling and reusing material — is central to the U.N. negotiations, in part because, for now, it's hard to imagine a world without plastic, says Winnie Lau, who leads a project at the Pew Charitable Trusts to keep plastic waste out of oceans.

But Marcos Orellana, the U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, says a circular economy is "wishful thinking" at best. "In the worst case, it's the design of a misinformation campaign intended to confuse the population," he says.

Oil producers will fight to keep their plastics business

What's clear is that oil-producing countries will fight to protect their business with the plastics industry.
Russia and China have argued that production cuts don't belong in a global plastics treaty. And Saudi Arabia said limiting the supply of plastics would "risk economic growth and stability." The countries are all participating in the negotiations.

"I am not a skeptic of business," Lau (of the Pew Charitable Trusts) says. But she says the solutions that companies are pitching to governments need scrutiny. "If you don't have the right accountability mechanism and oversight mechanism in place, they could be designed to not work at all."

The U.N.'s goal is to finish the treaty negotiations next year.

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Today's quote:

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. -Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)