GRAY MAGUIRE: Binding UN plastic treaty will bulk up SA’s reduction efforts

Monday marked the 50th anniversary of UN World Environment Day, which commemorates the start of the modern environmental movement in 1972 when Rachel Carson released Silent Spring and the Club of Rome released Limits to Growth. In 2024 the theme was #BeatPlasticPollution, which even the most casual observer will have noticed is becoming an increasingly newsworthy problem.

Appealing to the UN’s growing savvy for a marketing angle, the anniversary aligned neatly with last week’s second round of negotiations in Paris for the UN’s global treaty to end plastic pollution. Despite the usual silly buggers from oil-producing nations, keen to protect the 4% sliver that plastic production accounts for in global oil demand, the week ended with an agreement by the 170 participating nations to develop the first draft of a global treaty to curb plastic pollution. It is a problem that is far more dire than just an unsightly outing to the beach.

Global production of plastics increased from 2-million tonnes in 1950 to 359-million tonnes in 2018, with less than a fifth of production being recycled. Environmental effects on food production and livelihoods are alarming enough, but the emerging evidence of lesser-known health effects, including cancers and hormone disruption, should be enough cause for all of us to want to apply the brakes to this train.   

The treaty is set to include a set of comprehensive binding rules across the plastic life cycle, including global bans on high-risk plastic products and polymers, reducing production and consumption, promotion of reuse and recycling, and the responsible management of plastic waste.

In SA we have been raising awareness of the issue of plastic waste since antilittering campaigns began trying to get us to “zap it in a Zibi can” in the 1980s, seemingly with little effect. SA generates about 2.5-million tonnes of plastic waste every year, of which less than 15% is recycled. That is equivalent to more than 40kg per citizen, significantly higher than the global average of 29kg per year. Combined with increasingly poor solid waste removal, the World Wildlife Fund SA now estimates that about 79,000 tonnes of plastic leaks into the environment every year in SA. 

In response to the growing awareness that the old approach has been tried, tested and found lacking, two parallel initiatives were launched in SA in 2020. The first was the private sector-driven SA Plastics Pact, which commits members to designing out the use of certain plastics, developing reuse business models, increasing recyclate use and driving a circular economy approach to plastics overall.

The second initiative was the launch of the government’s extended producer responsibility (EPR) guidelines, an amendment to the National Waste Act that allows the state to identify products, including plastic ones, specify EPR measures for these products and identify parties responsible for the implementation of waste management reduction measures associated with them.

For the plastics sector the primary responsible parties, or producer responsibility organisations, are Polyco and Petco, which together with the SA Plastics Pact implementation lead organisation, GreenCape, have made decent progress over the three subsequent years on at least three of their four headline targets. Of course, the target that is proving most intractable is the one we most want to hear about. That is the percentage of plastics actually being recycled. 

This figure remains stubbornly difficult to increase as it is heavily affected by oil prices, a lack of control over imported plastic types and the annoying fact that SA Plastic Pact members account for only about a third of plastic packaging placed in the market. For a change, good progress is being made on the issue domestically.

The initiative’s annual report supplies a number of inspirational examples of companies stepping up to take the lead, with tangible results to show for it. An effective and binding international treaty would help enormously to capitalise on it.

• Maguire is carbon project manager at Climate Neutral Group SA. He writes in his personal capacity.