As the second meeting on a possible international treaty on plastic pollution takes place this week Experts are skeptical about the possibility of eliminating plastic pollution. The meeting will be held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
There is greater stress on recycling plastic to reduce its waste but recycling has other drawbacks of adding injurious chemicals to the recycled product. Moreover, the production and use of plastic are so high that only 9 percent of the plastic waste is recycled.
As a result, plastic pollution is growing relentlessly. The world produces twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. Most of it goes into landfills, gets incinerated, or is mismanaged.
Moreover, recent studies suggest that recycling plastic poses its own environmental and health risks, including the high levels of microplastics and harmful toxins produced by the recycling process that can be dangerous for people, animals, and the environment.
The UK recycling center used large amounts of water (a common practice in the recycling industry) to sort, shred, and separate plastics before they were compounded and turned into pellets for resale. Researchers found that there were 75 billion particles per meter cubed in the wash water.
About 6 percent of all the plastics that were coming into the facility were then released into the water as microplastics, even after filtration.
Microplastics are thought to carry disease-causing organisms that act as a vector for diseases in the environment – where many plastic particles produced by recycling are likely to end up.
Water used in recycling centers around the world often passes through sewage treatment facilities, which are just not designed to filter this size of microplastic.
More than two-thirds of UN member states agreed in March last year to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024, and the second round of meetings to draw up the treaty began in Paris. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which is hosting the talks, released a roadmap to reduce plastic waste by 80 percent by 2040.
The microplastic release is not the only flaw in the system. Recycling plastics means working with unregulated toxic chemicals. Plastics are made with as many as 13,000 chemicals, according to a UN report this month, and 3,200 of those have “hazardous properties” that could affect human health and the environment, according to a report from Greenpeace released last week.
Experts say that since there is no transparency [in the market], there’s no way for people to know which plastics contain toxic chemicals and which don’t.” The risk these chemicals pose increases among recycled plastics, as products with unknown compositions are heated and mixed.
Greenpeace’s report also found higher levels of toxic chemicals in recycled plastic than in their virgin counterparts, including kitchen utensils, children’s toys, and food packaging. plastics and found that these chemicals are making their way into the food chain.
The share of plastic waste that is recycled globally is expected to rise to 17 percent by 2060, according to figures from the OECD. But recycling more will not address a major issue: after being recycled once or twice, most plastics come to a dead end.
It is therefore difficult to make the case that recycled plastic is a sustainable material, said Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Campaign leader at Greenpeace USA, in a statement this week.
Coming into the talks in Paris, a 55-nation coalition called for restrictions on some hazardous chemicals and bans on problematic plastics products that are hard to recycle and often end up in nature.
