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More than 140 million tons of plastics already pollute the planet's rivers, oceans and lakes

2022-02-22T13:09:57.155Z


The OECD warns that only 9% of plastic waste is recycled. 193 countries negotiate in the UN the first world treaty to stop this plague


The data is heartbreaking: in just seven decades, human beings have contaminated aquatic ecosystems with more than 140 million tons of plastic.

Right now, about 109 million tons of this waste accumulate in the world's rivers and lakes;

another 30 million pollute the oceans;

and some 1.4 million are in transit from the rivers to the seas.

This is the balance of damages that includes a monographic report on this pollution of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

The study, published this Tuesday, puts the focus on a problem that is being dealt with at the UN assembly on the environment, which is being held in Nairobi, Kenya, during this week and the next.

In addition to the volume, the speed with which the problem has been generated is striking, which has gone hand in hand with the increase in the production of plastics.

In 1950, barely two million tons of this material, which is derived from petroleum, were manufactured in the world.

In 2021, annual global production reached 461 million tonnes after an increase that has accelerated over the past 20 years, according to OECD data.

And just 6% of the total plastics put on the market each year are now recycled.

Almost at the same rate that plastic production has skyrocketed, the generation of global waste from this material has increased.

In 2000, the volume of this waste was 156 million tons.

In 2019, it had already reached 353 million.

As this study warns, "nearly two-thirds of all plastic waste comes from applications with a useful life of less than five years."

40% are packaging, for example.

If these residues received adequate treatment so that they could be used again, the dimension of the problem would be much smaller.

But reuse is the exception and a chimera: only 9% of this waste was recycled in 2019, warns the OECD.

"The costs of collection and selection are very high," says Shardul Agrawala, who led this study.

Added to this is that recycled plastics have to compete in the markets on equal terms with primary plastics, which are very cheap to produce.

The analysis led by Agrawala bets that the public authorities promote the use of recycled plastic with regulations and transfer the true costs of this material to virgin plastic due to the pollution it causes.

The low recycling rate means that the main destination of the waste ends up being the landfill, 50% ended up there in 2019, and incineration (another 19%).

"The remaining 22% was disposed of in uncontrolled landfills, burned in the open air or ended up polluting the environment," warns the report.

The study presented this Tuesday puts at 22 million tons the plastic material that went into the environment in 2019. Of these, 6.1 million were dumped into rivers and seas, fattening a problem that has been on alert for years to the environmentalists and scientists.

"It's a global problem," says José Luis García Varas, head of the Oceans program at WWF.

"It is affecting biodiversity and there is beginning to be some light in research on the impacts on habitats," adds this member of WWF.

His organization published another report last week warning that by 2040 global plastics production will have doubled again.

By 2050 plastic pollution will quadruple if no action is taken.

For this reason, this and other environmental organizations are closely following the UN assembly on the environment.

“If a global and binding treaty is achieved to fight against plastics, it will be as relevant as the Paris Agreement was”,

Social concern about this type of pollution is not new.

But it reached its highest point in 2017, according to Agrawala, when there was a coincidence of scientific studies that warned of the magnitude of the problem that was brewing and awareness campaigns.

A few years earlier, in 2014, the UN Environment Assembly (known by its acronym UNEA) had for the first time called for a global deal against plastic pollution.

And, after several similar declarations, this assembly is now discussing in the Kenyan capital how that global agreement should be reached.

As with international agreements of this type, what is approved in the assembly must be unanimously approved by the 193 participating countries, hence the difficulty and slowness in closing agreements that affect a sector as powerful as the oil sector.

At the moment, there are three proposals on the negotiating table.

The first and the one that has the most support is the one sponsored by Peru and Rwanda, which advocates the immediate creation of an intergovernmental negotiating committee that would have the mandate to develop a "legally binding" global treaty to prevent and reduce plastic pollution. which would also include measures to limit production.

According to Peruvian diplomatic sources who have been working on this resolution in recent years,

reduce production

The proposal of Peru and Rwanda establishes that the treaty should be adopted, in principle, within two years.

Then, each country will have to ratify it as it happens with international agreements, the same sources explain.

Currently, 60 countries support this initiative, among which are all the members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway and several Latin American states such as Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador.

Although it is the one that has the most public support, the one led by Rwanda and Peru is not the only proposal that has been presented to the UN assembly, which is being held in a hybrid way;

face-to-face and telematically.

Japan has also advocated creating a committee to close a binding pact, but limited only to marine pollution and that would not affect the production of virgin plastic.

And, a few days ago, India presented another even less ambitious project that advocates only creating a non-binding framework focused mainly on single-use plastics.

"Although it does not fully comply with our requests, the proposal from Peru and Rwanda is the most advanced," says García Varas, from WWF.

The United States and China, the great consumers of plastic, have not made an official statement.

Meanwhile, the Reuters agency reported last week on the pressure being exerted by the groups of plastics manufacturers in the US and Europe to lower the agreement and not affect production.

On the other hand, around 70 large companies and international financial institutions released a declaration in January in support of the adoption of a binding treaty to combat plastic pollution at UNEA.

The signatories advocated "reducing the production and use of virgin plastic, and decoupling the production of plastic from the consumption of fossil resources."

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-02-22

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