Between COP 27 closing last month and the global biodiversity conference, COP 15, convening this week in Canada, another momentous sustainability summit has passed by relatively unnoticed.
In Uruguay last week, a convention of over 3,000 delegates from 160 countries met to begin hammering out details for the UN’s first international treaty on ending plastic pollution, which is set to enter effect in 2024.
The meeting was the first of several scheduled to negotiate the treaty, following a UN resolution in March that determined the world needs a plan to tackle plastic pollution. But negotiations are slow going. Delegates are split over whether the treaty should set mandatory reductions in plastic production or allow countries to set their own voluntary limits, like in the Paris Agreement.
“Why on earth would we be trying to negotiate a new convention which is modeled on something that’s essentially been a failure?” Chris Dixon, ocean campaign leader at the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency NGO told Bloomberg, advocating for a binding treaty on plastics.
Other contentious topics include how the treaty should balance targets to reduce plastic usage and recycle waste. Environmental campaigners favor cutting plastic production, and with good reason. Plastics are toxic pollutants that UN Secretary General António Guterres calls “fossil fuels in another form.”
Those who oppose plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste also contend that building circular economies—systems in which waste is recycled and repurposed as new products—only incentivizes the production of more waste to feed these loops.
I’ll admit, I’m much more in the “reduce waste” camp than the “recycle waste” camp, too. But given that plastics, like fossil fuels, will remain integral to our economy for years to come, recycling is an unavoidable necessity.
According to the UN Environment Program, plastic production is set to double over 2017 levels to 700 million tonnes of annual output by 2040. If left unchecked, roughly 29 million tonnes of that plastic will flow into the ocean as waste. Recycling, the UNEP says, could reduce that tsunami of plastic pollution by 80% while presenting new business opportunities for waste management companies.
“We're thinking through how we can take waste and not think of it as waste but treat it as a material that can be used for building other new products and services,” says Tara Hemmer, chief sustainability officer at WM (formerly Waste Management).
As one of the leading waste management firms in the U.S., WM already has access to “gobs and gobs of data" on where industries produce more than they need, Hemmer says. The company is currently “in the process of turning that data into deeper insights so that our customers can help manage their own businesses and platforms a little bit better.”
Some of WM’s solutions are already taking shape. In January, WM announced a partnership with construction company Continuus Materials, wherein WM provides the company with low value plastic and fiber waste, which Continuus converts into roofing boards.
Last month, WM partnered with petrochemicals giant Dow to pilot an initiative to recycle plastic film from residential trash—a common albeit hard-to-recycle waste item.
Film—like the clingy plastic that covers fresh food packages in supermarkets, or the thin type of plastic moulded into bread bags—is hard to recycle, Hemmer says, because the plastic often wraps around and clogs processing machines. But the company has invested in new robotic tech—optical sorters—that can identify the lightweight plastic and apply an air current to direct the film onto a separate waste channel. From there, the plastic is shredded, cleaned, and turned into pellets that Dow buys back to melt into new plastics.
For me, that's not a perfect solution. But so long as the recycling tech is available today, it’s better to recycle the waste than simply chuck it in a landfill.
Eamon Barrett
greeninc.news@gmail.com
@eamonbarrett88
