UN report urges more plastic pollution legislation

A new UN report has recommended a series of fresh legislative guidelines to meet anti-plastic pollution goals.

The report — Turning off the Tap: How the world can end plastic pollution and create a circular economy — calls for ambitious legislative and fiscal policies that would reduce overall plastic use, accelerate reuse and recycling, and create alternative materials to plastic.

"Where there is no legislation, you have much more plastic waste," said executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Inger Anderson. "It is obvious that regulation is required to boost recycling. If we do from bottom up, the world will not get the results we want."

The report suggests a three-pronged "systems change approach", which envisages usage of fossil-based plastics falling from 380mn t/yr to 149mn t/yr and polymers recycling increasing from 73mn t/yr to 111mn t/yr. Switching to more reusable products could reduce pollution by 30pc by 2040, the report said. It also calls for regulators to ensure that adequate "feedstock" for recycling is available, either through subsidies or a more transparent international trading system to move waste to areas with surplus recycling capacity, This, it said, could cut pollution by 20pc by 2040.

Finally, a switch to plastic alternatives could reduce plastic pollution by 17pc by 2040, the report said, although it acknowledges that truly sustainable alternatives that reduce pollution rather than just displacing it struggle to compete against virgin plastics.

"Even with the market transformation approach, a significant volume of plastics cannot be made circular in the next 10 to 20 years," the report said.

Implementing the systems change approach would cost $65bn/yr until 2040, the report estimated. This compares favourably against preliminary estimates of the annual social and environmental costs linked to plastic pollution, which the report estimates at between $300-600bn/yr and $1.5 trillion/yr.

"This report is coming out just ahead of the next round of talks (INC-2) and is intended to inform negotiators," Anderson said.

Recycling challenges

The report notes continuing difficulties in the recycling industry including a lack of products being designed with mechanical recycling in mind. Only 9pc of current plastic products are suitable as feedstock, according to the director of UNEP's Industry and Economy Division, Sheila Aggarwal Khan.

Better design-for-recycling could improve the situation, the report said. And legislation would be a key driver towards making recyclates more competitive in the face of cheap virgin plastic, it said.

"It is fairly obvious that when you put down some degree of legislation, some degree of EPR, some degree of deposit return, some degree of refill, this is what will enable [the plastic recycling industry]," said Anderson. "If we do it all from the bottom up, I don't know that we will get the kind of solution that the world is expecting."

The report calls on polymer and chemical producers to continue investing in chemical recycling technology, suggesting that legislators should look at incentives to increase chemical conversion capacity for difficult-to-recycle plastics. The report notes "important shortcomings" with chemical recycling, including high carbon costs, which mean that mechanical recycling should remain a priority and chemical processes should be "scaled with careful consideration". Chemical recycling "can complement mechanical recycling", it said, suggesting the implementation of a global standard to ensure the safety and sustainability of chemical recycling processes.

By Jeffrey Wang