There is no data on global plastic pollution that is equivalent to the regular measurements of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. But as with greenhouse gases, the recent news has been nearly all bad. In 1950, worldwide production of plastics stood at 2m tons per year. In 2020, it was 367m tons (down from 368m the year before due to the coronavirus pandemic). An increase this enormous is hard to visualise. But the 8.8m tons of plastic waste that is estimated to enter the world’s marine environment each year is the equivalent of a rubbish truck filled with plastic being tipped into the sea every minute.
So the agreement struck by 173 countries at the UN environment assembly in Nairobi last week was a huge relief. At last, something is going to be done multilaterally about a problem that no government can solve on its own. Without the legally binding treaty that will be negotiated over the next two years, it was hard to see where progress would come from.
