Plastic pollution: is it time for mandatory measures?

Despite years of appeals and encour­age­ment, plas­tic pol­lu­tion is only get­ting worse. Is it time to drop the car­rot and pick up the stick?

The car­rots have been pos­i­tive and plen­ti­ful. There are inter­na­tion­al pub­lic-pri­vate projects, such as the Afri-Plas­tics Chal­lenge, backed by the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment, which is tack­ling the alarm­ing rise in plas­tic waste across Africa. There are oth­er efforts in domes­tic mar­kets, like the UK Plas­tics Pact from the Waste Resource Action Pro­gramme (WRAP).

Indus­try-led ini­tia­tives abound, too. Last June, for exam­ple, five of the UK’s biggest names in brand­ed fast-mov­ing con­sumer goods — Mars UK, Mon­delēz Inter­na­tion­al, Nestlé, Pep­si­Co and Unilever — formed a £1m Flex­i­ble Plas­tic Fund to make recy­cling more eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable for oper­a­tors and eas­i­er for con­sumers. Indi­vid­ual retail­ers like Boots also have their own pro­grammes.

For all this wave of activ­i­ty, the scale of the plas­tic prob­lem appears to dwarf the efforts of busi­ness and indus­try. The real­i­ty is that the world pro­duces twice as much plas­tic waste as it did two decades ago, with the bulk of it end­ing up in land­fill, incin­er­at­ed or leak­ing into the envi­ron­ment. Just 9% of plas­tic waste is suc­cess­ful­ly recy­cled, accord­ing to the OECD.

In response, the UK gov­ern­ment will be wield­ing a new stick, as of April 2022, in the form of the Plas­tic Pack­ag­ing Tax (PPT). Under the PPT, a £200 per tonne tax will apply to plas­tic pack­ag­ing con­tain­ing less than 30% recy­cled con­tent. It’s esti­mat­ed the mea­sure could affect up to 20,000 pack­ag­ing pro­duc­ers and importers.

So, are sticks the answer?

Unbound pollution

Paula Chin is senior pol­i­cy advis­er on con­sump­tion at WWF. There is no sim­ple answer, she says. Address­ing the com­plex­i­ties of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion need­ed to stem the flow of plas­tics into nature is ulti­mate­ly a trans­bound­ary issue.

“We’ve already seen a com­bi­na­tion of levers adopt­ed by gov­ern­ments across the world to address the plas­tic pol­lu­tion cri­sis, includ­ing bans, tax­es, charges, reg­u­la­tions and leg­is­la­tion. But as yet these actions have not been enough to tack­le the issue.”

A nar­row focus on spe­cif­ic leg­is­la­tion can have unin­tend­ed con­se­quences, Chin notes.
“Where sticks have been used, they’ve addressed low-hang­ing fruit, for exam­ple bans on plas­tic straws, charges on sin­gle-use car­ri­er bags. But these mea­sures have led to mate­r­i­al-switch­ing by pro­duc­ers, which mere­ly shifts envi­ron­men­tal and social bur­dens to dif­fer­ent sup­ply chains, all of which have their own impacts.”

The main chal­lenge to date has been a lack of glob­al coor­di­na­tion, which is need­ed to ensure the mea­sures tak­en by indi­vid­ual nations scale up to deliv­er real ben­e­fit. That’s why the news from the UN Assem­bly in Nairo­bi ear­li­er this month was met with such applause, when rep­re­sen­ta­tives of 175 nations signed a break­through glob­al res­o­lu­tion to end plas­tic pol­lu­tion.

This land­mark leap towards an inter­na­tion­al legal­ly bind­ing instru­ment rais­es ques­tions for the pack­ag­ing indus­try. It may be enter­ing a new era of hard­line, manda­to­ry pol­i­cy and reg­u­la­to­ry dri­vers, which will super­sede the soft­er-touch vol­un­tary schemes.

Legislation in limbo

When it comes to pol­i­cy imple­men­ta­tion, delays in deliv­ery don’t help.

The launch of the UK’s first Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in Scot­land, for instance, has been pushed back twice already to 2023. The Extend­ed Pro­duc­er Respon­si­bil­i­ty (EPR) reforms are in dan­ger of far­ing even worse; they’re no longer due next year, with no new timetable offi­cial­ly in place.

This is a revamp of 1997 leg­is­la­tion, so it’s seri­ous­ly over­due. The new EPR would see pro­duc­ers effec­tive­ly made liable for the full cost of man­ag­ing the pack­ag­ing that’s put on the mar­ket. The gov­ern­ment esti­mates the impact could total about £2.7bn in the first full year of oper­a­tion.

The fact that it lan­guish­es in post-con­sul­ta­tion lim­bo is a source of sig­nif­i­cant frus­tra­tion, giv­en its poten­tial to effect change, says Louise Nicholls, Chair of the Insti­tute of Envi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment and Assess­ment (IEMA), a pro­fes­sion­al body for envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­i­ty prac­ti­tion­ers.

“The key to trans­for­ma­tion is EPR: a mix of tax­a­tion to encour­age sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing; trans­par­ent report­ing of quan­ti­fied tar­gets; strong focus on cit­i­zen behav­iour change; and sup­port for local author­i­ties and waste col­lec­tors to devel­op and main­tain infra­struc­ture.”

EPR mech­a­nisms exist in oth­er coun­tries, includ­ing Cana­da, South Korea and Japan, along with sev­er­al Euro­pean nations. How­ev­er, the UK’s stat­ed hopes of achiev­ing an over­all recy­cling rate for EPR pack­ag­ing of 73% by 2030 seem to be fad­ing.

Unplugged gaps in the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work are anoth­er bug­bear, says Nicholls.
“Plas­tic shrink wrap on multi­buy cans, such as beer, fizzy drinks and beans, has def­i­nite­ly been poor­ly reg­u­lat­ed, with home recy­cling not con­sis­tent­ly avail­able,” she says. “Alter­na­tives exist, for exam­ple card, but there’s lit­tle incen­tive or pres­sure for man­u­fac­tur­ers to change.”

A per­ceived long-term lack of resources and invest­ment in enforce­ment bod­ies also rais­es con­cerns that any polic­ing of new rules and reg­u­la­tions will lack the nec­es­sary teeth.

Prizes and penalties

“With a prob­lem of this mag­ni­tude, vol­un­tary mea­sures can only get us so far,” admits Jeff Kirschn­er, founder and CEO of Lit­terati, a US data-sci­ence com­pa­ny that aims to empow­er peo­ple to ‘crowd­source clean’ the plan­et.

With over a quar­ter of a mil­lion mem­bers in 185 coun­tries world­wide, Lit­terati has so far record­ed and mapped an over­all lit­ter pick­up of more than 15 mil­lion pieces of trash.
Wit­ness­ing the pack­ag­ing waste prob­lem first-hand on a dai­ly basis, how­ev­er, Kirschn­er is con­vinced that while reg­u­la­tion and var­i­ous cor­rec­tive mea­sures may play a role in reduc­ing plas­tic waste, there are oth­er prac­ti­cal solu­tions. “Whether it’s the shift from sin­gle use to reuse, where inno­v­a­tive busi­ness­es are pro­vid­ing refill­able options, or a push for nation­wide DRS, all options should be on the table.”

In the end, sus­tain­able change calls for both prizes and penal­ties, he believes. “Ulti­mate­ly, we may find that reward-based incen­tives cou­pled with puni­tive actions cre­ate the one-two punch need­ed to solve plas­tic waste.”