Fixing Plastic Pollution

The World Environment Day campaign #BeatPlastic Pollution requires proactive action from all stakeholders-governments, industry bodies, businesses and common citizens-for the health of people and the planet

- Shailaja Tripathi

This World Environment Day, June 5, the spotlight is aptly on plastic pollution. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched the campaign #Beat Plastic Pollution to focus attention on solutions to plastic pollution.

According to UNEP, one garbage truck's worth of plastic is poured into our oceans every minute. Approximately 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic manufactured between 1950 and 2017 ended up as waste, either in landfills or dumped. If this is to continue unchecked, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. These statistics underline the urgency to address the plastic pollution crisis.

The Global Plastics Outlook database, set up by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), notes that only 15 per cent of global plastic waste is collected for the purpose of recycling. Out of this, close to half is disposed off as residues, which results in only 9 per cent of plastic waste getting recycled. Another 19 per cent gets incinerated, 50 per cent ends up in landfill and 22 per cent evades waste management systems. This goes into uncontrolled dumpsites, is burned in open pits or ends up in terrestrial or aquatic environments, especially in the poorer countries.

Clearly, the existing recycling machinery in the world will not be sufficient in combatting the plague of plastic pollution. "We will not recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis; we need a systemic transformation to achieve the transition to a circular economy," Inger Andersen, executive director at UNEP, said some time ago.