Think Plastically For A Way Out Of The Plastic Emergency

A stringent ban on single-use plastic came into place in South Australia from September 1, following the aborted attempts to limit the production of plastics at a global conference in August. Bans on plastic products in various places have been mandated in many places, including India, with mostly unsatisfactory outcomes. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the problem.

The second part of the fifth session of the International Negotiating Committee to develop an international, legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment (INC-5.2), took place from August 5 to 15, 2025, in Geneva but ended without unanimity.

The scale of the plastics problem is immense. It is estimated that over 500 million tonnes of plastics were consumed in 2024 alone, with 400 million tonnes becoming plastic waste. In the absence of urgent interventions, global plastic waste could become overwhelming.

More than 100 of 180-plus countries pushed for, most importantly, a cap on plastic production, but a joint statement based on unanimous agreement floundered in the face of a strong pushback from petrostates like Saudi Arabia, which insisted on focusing on recycling and reuse. The conference ended in failure, highlighting the limits of multilateralism in the environmental sphere, as entrenched fossil-fuel lobbies double down on ecocidal practices.

It has been clear for some time that solutions for problems like exploding plastic use, which is intimately connected with the problem of climate change, must combine both supply and demand management. But from a commonsensical position it is abundantly clear that demand management cannot solve the problem of plastic inundation and the ubiquity of the toxic chemicals that go into their manufacture—most importantly, the toxic ‘forever chemicals’ that have polluted all ecological spaces and emerged as one of the most rampant of health hazards we are confronted with. Hazards not just to human health, but to the health of all living organisms on Spaceship Earth.

Consider this. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only 9 per cent of plastic is recycled. The rest goes into landfills, is incinerated, or escapes into the environment, for instance, in the form of microplastics that have penetrated animal bodies and environments, including marine habitats, on a pretty much ubiquitous scale.

The problem of recycling is partly logistical—it is expensive and sometimes technologically challenging, as with plastics with food residues, and difficult to collect and manage. Producing cheap plastic is way cheaper than recycling it. Which brings us to the logical part of the problem. How will recycling, reusing and reducing—the old environmental mantra—help if we continue to manufacture plastic for every conceivable kind of consumption, from single to infrastructural use?

Recycling at scale is not possible. But can reusing plastics and reducing their use at a large enough scale manage the demand side sufficiently to force a significant supply-side recalibration? Experience suggests not. In fact, an excessive focus on managing demand is an attempt to shift responsibility to individuals. In relation to climate change, fossil-fuel apologists have tried to do this by running opulently funded campaigns. While personal responsibility is important, the reduction of plastic use has to be achieved through policy interventions. At scale.

We’ll come to the question of possible solutions after taking a brief look at the scale of the problems that plastics pose. Let’s begin with health. An experts’ review has said in a recent report in Lancet that the world is in a plastics crisis that is posing a “grave, growing, and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health. Disease and death from infancy to old age are responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health-related damages.

The crisis is being driven by a huge explosion of plastics production that has increased 200 times from 1950 and could triple by 2060 to more than a billion tonnes a year. The most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use plastic, such as soft-drink bottles and fast-food containers. From the top of mountain ranges to the deepest of ocean trenches, 8 billion tonnes of plastic pollute the earth. Microplastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – forever chemicals – have contaminated the remotest nooks and crannies of the planet and living bodies, posing barely assessable health emergencies.

And there is the link to climate change. While we decarbonise, we need to remember that 98 per cent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, releasing the equivalent of 2 billion tonnes of CO2, more than the emissions of Russia, the world’s fourth biggest emitter. Add to that the plastic that is burnt, which constitutes more than half the world’s unmanaged waste, which further pollutes the air.

The scale of the problem demands desperate measures, just as that of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. When the Kyoto Protocol was designed, the US, the biggest GHG emitter, refused to sign up. Almost all countries adopted it.

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There is no reason now for the international community to agree to be held hostage by the obdurate refusal of a few petrostates to sign up to a pact limiting plastics production. The rest of the world can sign up to a plastics-limitation treaty, with national caps imposed. This must be accompanied by stringent controls on the global plastics trade, first targeting the most harmful of plastics—those made for single use.

There will be costs in terms of prices. But just as technological ingenuity has led us into the plastics trap, surely it can lead us out of it. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight, just like the campaign to reduce GHG emissions. But for the future of human civilisation, it has to be done.