'Time bomb' threatens the environment

All plastics, whether single-use or longer-term, contribute to the growing amount of micro and nano plastics, creating a “time bomb” for future generations. This pollution bomb will explode on its own if the world does not act now.

Seven years after the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), Paris is once again at the centre of world environmental diplomacy .

More than 1,000 delegates from 175 countries and 3,000 representatives of non-governmental organizations, industry and science gathered at UNESCO headquarters from May 29 to June 2 to undertake an ambitious but challenging mission: negotiating a legally binding multilateral agreement to “end plastic pollution” by the end of 2024. This is considered the most important global agreement since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

After five “arduous” days, negotiators finally adopted a resolution at the plenary session that ended late on June 2, according to which “the International Negotiating Committee (INC) requested the Chairman of the Committee, with the assistance of the Secretariat, to develop a draft of the first version of a legally binding international treaty” immediately after this conference.

Plastic waste overflows in Lahore, Pakistan. Photo: AFP/TTXVN

According to the resolution, the draft text will be considered at the third meeting of the INC in Kenya in November. The next round of negotiations will then take place in Canada in April 2024 and culminate with a formal agreement in South Korea by the end of 2024.

So it’s hard to say that the second round of talks on ending global plastic pollution in Paris was a success. Looking back at the conference, negotiators were only able to get to the heart of the matter after the first two days were bogged down in procedural issues over the draft of a future agreement. By the end, 175 countries had still not found a common voice on the issue of whether to use a two-thirds majority vote when consensus was not reached.

Still, there has been encouraging progress. While it may not result in a major text, the conference has at least helped to iron out differences and clarify the positions that each side is willing to take. It has also laid the groundwork for a draft text that is expected to take six months before a third round of talks in Kenya.

It is worth noting that this time, the “highly ambitious coalition” has been strengthened with the participation of 58 countries chaired by Norway and Rwanda, including members of the European Union (EU), Canada, Mexico, Australia and Japan… On the contrary, Paris also showed the formation of a bloc of countries that slowed down the progress of the discussions. That is the oil and gas and plastic production bloc, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, the US, China, India, Russia and Brazil.

The two blocs have different, even opposing, visions of global solutions to plastic pollution, forming two camps that follow two trends: those who want to protect a binding system with a two-thirds majority and those who oppose it, wanting to impose consensus rules like the Paris Agreement on climate change. Or those who are “willing” to see the world reduce production according to the new model and those who are “reluctant” to just recycle to reduce plastic pollution.

With what has happened, the negotiation process seems to be still in its early stages, while the most thorny issues related to production control, consumption, use, recycling and financial obligations… are still waiting for the remaining 3 rounds. It will be a real battle of views between countries, NGOs, scientists and lobbyists.

French Minister for the Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu said the challenges for the upcoming negotiations are enormous and the most important thing is to reach a binding treaty, fully equipped with enforcement means and to establish a specialized agency on plastics, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And all countries and industrialists must have the obligation to reduce plastic production before thinking about solutions to increase recycling.

In fact, it will be difficult to convince the oil, gas and plastics producing bloc to abandon the idea of “seeing a moderately ambitious treaty text”. Dorothée Moisan, a French journalist who writes about environmental issues, said the plastics industry is closely linked to the oil, gas and coal industries. With an estimated turnover of about $1 trillion a year, plastics are the “lifeline” of the petrochemical industry.

Normally, a barrel of oil today can be extracted from about 10% plastic, but in fact there are technologies that allow to extract 40% or even 80%. The profits from plastic make most manufacturers want to continue the current trend, that is, to increase production steadily every year, doubling from 2000 to 2019 and possibly tripling by 2060, regardless of the amount of plastic waste that this volume will drown the planet.

If plastic production were to shrink, oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, or large plastic producers like China, would lose a huge source of revenue. In March, Saudi Aramco announced a $3.6 billion investment to develop a giant petrochemical complex in China. In late 2022, the company also signed an $11 billion deal with France’s TotalEnergies to develop a similar project in Saudi Arabia, which would include two plants to produce polyethylene, the world’s most widely used plastic.

According to Mr. Christophe Béchu, the average inhabitant of the planet today uses 60 kg of plastic per year and in the past 50 years, the world has discarded more than 7 billion tons of plastic. In 2019 alone, the world discarded 353 million tons of plastic waste, weighing as much as 35,000 Eiffel Towers, and 81% of plastic products were turned into waste in less than a year. In the past 20 years, annual plastic production has more than doubled to reach 460 million tons and at this rate, the volume of plastic will triple by 2060.

Plastics pollute throughout their lifecycle, because as they age, they break down into micro- and nano-plastics. Plastics behave very differently from all other materials humans use, because they cannot be re-entered into any of the biogeochemical cycles that help stabilize Earth’s ecosystems. All plastics, whether single-use or long-term, contribute to the buildup of micro- and nano-plastics, creating a time bomb for future generations. This pollution bomb will explode on its own if the world does not take strong action now.

According to VNA/Tin Tuc Newspaper

Source link