Trying to end plastic pollution

UN delegates are trying to bash out a Plastics Treaty with the ambitious goal of ending plastic pollution. They met last week in Nairobi to mark the half-way point towards the treaty, which is supposed to be written and signed in 2024. But progress was frustratingly slow. People at the meeting said a few nations with fossil fuel interests were blocking progress, slowing things down and making the draft treaty just get longer instead of shorter. Sigh.

Here's my story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03579-1

The scale of the problem has become epic. There is SO MUCH PLASTIC in our lives. I find it hard to imagine a world without plastic wrappers and packaging but that's where we're now trying to go... 

In my view, hopefully the treaty will:

- set a legally-binding cap for how much virgin plastic the planet is allowed to make per year. (Some people are saying cap it at 2025 levels. Others say it needs to be waaay lower: Greenpeace says it should be 75% lower than 2019 levels. We shall see)

= list out chemicals of concern (like PVC) and work to phase them out. Apparently there are around 13,000 chemicals in plastics, of which many thousands are already known to be toxic. Sigh.

- set a requirement for USE of recycled plastics in new material (because the problem isn't how much plastic we collect to recycle, but what happens to it after it's recycled. Right now there just isn't much demand for it, because virgin plastic is cheap)

and more...

Some UN treaties are really specific about what things need to happen (like the Montreal Protocol, which killed off ozone-depleting substances). Others are pretty vague (like the Paris Agreement, which tells countries to set their own targets for greenhouse gas reductions). Scientists are hoping the Plastics Treaty (whatever it gets called in the end) will be ambitious, specific, legally binding... Fingers crossed!