One such approach, called environmental economic accounting, is already being used in some countries to track various raw materials. The new treaty could help by promoting or establishing standard measuring and accounting methods.
“There are several holes in the data,” Jambeck says. Methods of counting microplastics in water-shed from synthetic fabrics, for example, or formed when large plastic objects degrade-also vary. Nonprofit groups and government agencies use dozens of varying protocols for surveying beach litter, for example. Taking such a broad approach to plastics, says Anja Brandon, a policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy, “is going to be a much bigger scientific endeavor.”įor one thing, rigorous, comparable numbers on the scope and sources of the problem are scarce, making it difficult to identify pollution hot spots or detect trends. But no global treaty tries to reduce pollution by targeting a product’s entire life cycle, from its birth as a raw material to its death-if it becomes trash. “It’s about time,” says Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of Toronto who has called on nations to tackle the issue.Įxisting international efforts to reduce marine litter and exposure to hazardous chemicals include some measures related to plastic pollution. Their ambitious goal: to create a negotiating committee that will try to hammer out, within 2 years, a new global treaty intended to curb plastic pollution.Īn already released proposal, modeled on the United Nations’s climate treaty, would have nations adopt action plans, set binding waste reduction targets, and establish monitoring systems and a new global scientific advisory body. That’s exactly what negotiators from 193 countries are setting out to do when they meet in Nairobi, Kenya, next week. To curb the flood, says Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia, “we need to take more action and it needs to be further upstream” in the production process.
The rising tide-in the oceans and beyond-is just a symptom of much wider problems: unsustainable product design, short-sighted consumption, and insufficient waste management, scientists say. Each year, an estimated 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean, equivalent to a cargo ship’s worth every day.
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