The World Has One Big Chance to Fix Plastics
Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human placenta. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to become plastics in Europe. And much of the plastic waste from Europe and the U.S. streams back toward Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America. Yet the dispersal of plastics and their pollutants, if regulated at all, has been addressed through a patchwork of municipal and national policies and a smattering of uncoordinated international instruments.
Early this month, however, following 10 days of late-night negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) passed a mandating the creation of a multilateral treaty to address plastic pollution. One hundred seventy-five nations backed its provisions, which are to be legally binding, rather than voluntary. Once in force, the treaty could be of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and in its provisions, likely even more far-reaching. The meeting an ebullient wave of joy and tired-teary relief.
