UN vows to continue war on plastic
The United Nations has promised to continue trying to force restrictions on plastic in member states to “fight climate change” despite a breakdown in negotiations this week.
The UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) convened on Monday in Busan, South Korea to finalize a treaty that would limit plastic production and require measures to reduce plastic pollution. The text of the agreement suggests such measures could include bans on plastic bags, straws, and other products. It was clear both from the meeting and the text that the treaty would require governments to impose climate mandates.
"A treaty that . . . only relies on voluntary measures would not be acceptable," said Rwanda's Environment Management Authority Director General Juliet Kabera, according to Reuters. "It is time we take it seriously and negotiate a treaty that is fit for purpose and not built to fail."
The agreement would also require governments to teach school children about the evils of plastic.
It was the fifth meeting of the INC and intended to be the final one, but an agreement was not reached. This was partly due to oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia opposing restrictions on plastic production.
“If you address plastic pollution, there should be no problem with producing plastics, because the problem is the pollution, not the plastics themselves,” said Saudi Arabia’s Abdulrahman Al Gwaiz.
UN Environment Programme head Inger Andersen signaled that while negotiations had broken down, the stage was set to resume talks in the future.
“It obviously did not fail,” Andersen said, adding: “What we do have is very, very good progress.”
Do plastic bans work?
Many countries currently have some form of plastic ban in place, usually on plastic shopping bags. However, evidence shows that single-use plastic bags are better for the environment.
Figures presented by Our World in Data reveal the “number of times a given grocery bag type would have to be reused to have as low an environmental impact as a standard single-use plastic bag.” According to the data, an organic cotton shopping bag would have to be reused 20,000 times to match a plastic bag in environmental impact. A conventional cotton bag would have to be reused 7,100 times and a composite bag 870 times.
The site lists seven more categories that require fewer uses, but none as harmless as a plastic bag, including recycled PET (84 reuses), polypropylene, non-woven, recycled (52 reuses), polypropylene, woven, recycled (45 reuses), bleached paper (43 reuses), unbleached paper (43 reuses), biopolymer (42 reuses), and polyester PET, recycled (35 reuses).
The situation is similar when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, based on an analysis of the “number of times a given grocery bag type would have to be reused to have as low a level of greenhouse gas emissions as a standard single-use plastic bag.”
These data are based on a 2018 study commissioned by the Danish Environmental Agency, which analyzed 14 types of bags in Denmark. The study compared 'all environmental indicators,' which was a combined value for climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, human toxicity (cancer effects), human toxicity (non-cancer effects), photochemical ozone formation, ionizing radiation, particulate matter, terrestrial acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, marine eutrophication, ecosystem toxicity, resource depletion (fossil), resource depletion (abiotic), and water resource depletion.
For most categories, the study found that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags, which are the usual plastic shopping bags in supermarkets, “are the carriers providing the overall lowest environmental impacts for most environmental indicators.”
