Plastics, consumer goods makers in $1.5-B pledge to rein in waste

OIL AND GAS company Statoil gas processing and CO2 removal platform Sleipner T is pictured in the offshore near the Stavanger, Norway, Feb. 11, 2016. FRANKFURT — Global companies including BASF, DowDuPont, Procter & Gamble and SABIC have formed an alliance to fight plastic waste, pledging to spend $1.5 billion over the next five years.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), unveiled by its 28 founding companies on Wednesday, convened amid reports of a worsening environmental crisis from about 8 million tons of plastic waste that end up in oceans every year, which has triggered bans on some single-use plastic products.

Current alliance members have committed more than $1 billion to the project over the next five years, while money that additional members will pledge should take the five-year budget to about $1.5 billion, a spokesman said. The funds will be spent on waste collection infrastructure mainly in Africa and Asia, on technology for recycling and re-use of waste, on educating governments as well as local communities, and on cleaning up highly polluted areas.

The alliance (https://endplasticwaste.org/answers), currently made up of plastics makers for the most part, said about 90% of global marine litter comes from just 10 rivers and over half of the land-based plastic litter leaking into oceans originates from five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

AEPW counts none of China’s major plastics and chemical groups — Sinochem, ChemChina and Sinopec — among its members LONDON — The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) allowances soared 250% last year to a record high of €144 billion ($164 billion), analysts at Refinitiv said on Wednesday.

The overall figure was pushed higher by the soaring cost of carbon permits in Europe’s Emissions Trading System, (ETS) which more than trebled last year from €8 a ton to around €25.

“In Europe we attribute the price rise mainly to anticipation A SEAGULL looks for food among plastic waste on the coastal edge of a beach in Valparaiso, Chile in this Oct. 30, 2018 photo. but the spokesman said discussions to enlist Chinese players were continuing.

IHS Markit said in an October report that 59% of global plastic waste comes from packaging.

Amid rising consumer concern over plastic waste, consumer goods heavyweights such as Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Unilever and Henkel have individually pledged to make their packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable of the Market Stability Reserve that came into effect in January 2019: it will significantly tighten the supply,” the analysts said in an annual global market report.

The ETS charges power plants and factories for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.

The ETS has suffered from excess supply since the financial crisis, but this will be addressed by new measures including the Market Stability Reserve, which from this year will remove some surplus allowances from the market. by 2025 over the last two years.

Procter & Gamble and Henkel are currently the only branded consumer goods makers among AEPW members but the alliance’s spokesman said more would likely join over the next few weeks.

The location of the alliance’s headquarters had not yet been decided and the search for a chief executive was ongoing, the spokesman added. —

“We see 2018 as an outlier when it comes to price increase in one single year, and do not expect a repetition of such steep path in 2019,” said Anders Nordeng, senior carbon analyst at Refinitiv and a contributor to the report.

A total of nine billion carbon permits were traded globally in 2018, up 45% on the previous year, the analysts said.

The European market accounted for 90% of the total value of globally traded carbon permits, with North American trading schemes making up 9%, the report said.

Volumes and traded value grew in North America in both the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), “largely in anticipation of new rules in both trading systems for when they enter new trading periods starting in 2021,” the analysts said.

The emerging markets in China and South Korea still see very limited trading, despite the fact that their emission trading systems cover vast emissions volumes, the analysts said. —