Davos must confront the devastation of plastic waste
World leaders can effect change – but they need to be brave and back ways to create a non-toxic future
More than 2,000 world leaders and experts are convening at the World Economic Forum in Davos to address the most urgent and pressing issues facing the planet today. Climate change, negotiating the lasting effects of the pandemic, creating a business environment that addresses social equity are all high on the agenda as we try to rise to the challenges facing humanity today.
While it is important that these pressing issues are being tabled, if the World Economic Forum is to have the impact intended, it must avoid allowing another opportunity to tackle the plastic crisis slip under the radar.
If the plastics industry were a country, it would be the fifth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. While the environmental devastation caused by plastic pollution guilts us all, it is the invisible impacts that we should be even more concerned about – micro and nanofibres by the billions in our air, ocean and food systems; thousands of chemicals, many of which are known to be toxic, leaching into every part of our ecosystem and now into our own bodies.
We have become so addicted to this miraculous material that we cannot imagine living without it. We fear that a plastic-free world will be about denial, when in fact it will unleash the biggest material and systemic change we have seen for a hundred years. This is the next revolution. And the opportunities will be extraordinary.
However, it won’t happen unless we see plastic for what it is – Plan B for the fossil fuels industry. And wake up to the fact the lobbyists have been working overtime to ensure plastic was not even on the agenda for Cop26 and the word “plastic” is not mentioned throughout the entire body of the Paris Agreement.
Plastic is not a pollution issue, it is a production issue, a design issue. We need to fundamentally rethink how we make everything in our quest for a circular, non-toxic future.
But there is good news. Innovation is happening at speed and scale. Material scientists, freed from focusing on plastic polymers, are creating a new ecosystem of materials. Materials that are regenerative and additive, working with nature rather than against her. Materials that are not just bio-based or nutrient-based, possibly laced with chemicals and plastic additives. These materials mislead and delay the real progress we need. The new generation of materials are not “based” on anything. They are actual nutrients with names we recognise, taken from nature and returned to nature as nutrients with no chemical modification.
We know we have mere months before the UN Global Plastics Treaty is finalised. How can Davos pave the way for a treaty with teeth? A treaty that creates different metrics for all future materials, testing for technical and cost performance – as we do now – but also testing for health and environmental impact and, of course, for fairness.
Because plastic is a human right and a humanitarian issue too. Plastic waste distribution worsens the inequality in our world, as wealthy nations in the West force the majority of their plastic waste to developing countries, most of which lack the necessary infrastructure to process it. This waste imperialism means those in poorer countries disproportionately feel the harmful environmental and health consequences created by the catastrophic tide of plastic.
Burdened by mountains of plastic waste, one million people in developing countries die yearly from diseases caused by living in close proximity to plastic pollution.
There is only one solution. We need to turn off the plastic tap – but instead we are trebling down on plastic.
Since 2019, 42 new polymer facilities are under construction in the United States alone, mostly in areas with low-income housing. The rich don’t want the manufacturing of plastic near them any more than they want the waste it creates.
As ever, where there is change, there is opportunity. This is where the World Economic Forum can play a necessary role and it’s up to the world leaders and experts attending to keep the pressure on plastic, supporting the UN process. Who will fund the innovations we need if not championed by those attending? Of course, it’s all about the money and there’s fortunes to be made by the favoured brave.