Plastics are made of oil or fracked ethane. The #FossilFuel industry is looking to plastics as their future income stream. Not surprisingly:
At negotiations to end #PlasticPollution, delays "manufactured" by oil-rich countries "left little time to discuss the actual ins and outs of the future #plastics treaty — including whether to reduce plastic production, how to fund the implementation of the treaty, and whether to ban certain single-use plastic products."
Frontline communities urgently need an end to #PlasticPollution .
"Communities on the frontlines of any part of the #plastic lifecycle, from oil extraction to trash dumps and everywhere in between, are hit with a trifecta of injustice: plastic pollution, social #injustice, and the #climate crisis. The plastic deluge that is left after every climate-crisis-fuelled storm only reinforces this point."
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/frontline-communities-need-ambitious-global-plastics-treaty
"The world will be “unable to cope” with the sheer volume of plastic waste a decade from now unless countries agree to curbs on production, the co-chair of a coalition of key countries has warned ahead of crunch talks on curbing global #PlasticPollution.
Progress has stalled over a row about the need for cuts to the $712bn plastics industry.
The final round of talks, which starts on Monday and is due to end on 1 December, is critical."
"The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (including ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste in five years to the end of 2023, by recycling, and creating a circular economy.
The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years – more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has actually removed."
"The new data was revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution: a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.
But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty."
"Carbon Brief analysis shows that without any agreement to cut plastic production, emissions from plastics could consume half of the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels."
https://www.carbonbrief.org/five-charts-why-a-un-plastics-treaty-matters-for-climate-change/
Plastics currently cause triple the emissions of aviation.
If, for climate reasons, you're not hot on flying: I'm with you!
Let's also work on plastics.
Plastics are everywhere, so you can tackle it everywhere.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/five-charts-why-a-un-plastics-treaty-matters-for-climate-change/
#PFAS and #microplastics become more toxic when combined, research shows
"Study detects synergistic effect making substances more dangerous, raising alarm since humans are exposed to both"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/25/pfas-microplastics-toxic
Global plastic talks collapse as oil states rebel
"Although many issues are being discussed the key split is around Article 6 - whether there should be a commitment to cutting how much #plastic is produced, or just try and reduce plastic waste by increasing efforts to recycle."efforts to cut production levels."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785l1nrpd1o
Who is surprised?
Oil and gas companies (including petrostates) are *counting* on plastics for their growth for the next decade. Cutting production? Forget it.
Oh, and:
"InfluenceMap, a think tank, found that the petrochemical industry intervened dozens of times on the treaty via company statements, social media and consultation responses, and 93% of those were unsupportive of efforts to cut production levels."
"Malaysia will ban plastic waste imports from the U.S. starting Tuesday because of America’s failure to abide by the Basel Convention treaty on international waste transfers, in a move that could have significant consequences for California.
The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries, including Fiji and Haiti, that hasn’t signed the pact.
Malaysia emerged as a major destination for U.S. waste after China banned American waste imports in 2018."
"Negotiations for a historic global treaty to end plastic pollution reconvene in August, three years after they began. The goal is ambitious: to set new, legally binding and equitable global agreements that change how plastics are produced and consumed.
Fossil fuels and subsidies are at the core of the plastic crisis."
"Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. The world is in a “plastics crisis”, it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages."
"The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060. While plastic has many important uses, the most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use plastics, such as drinks bottles and fast-food containers."
More than 98% of plastics are made from fossil oil, gas and coal.
Add the $1.5tn health costs of plastics to the $ 7tn annual cost of burning fossil fuels (subsidies, health costs, etc, but not counting climate costs), and the case for stopping the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry becomes that much stronger.
What if we redirected this at least $ 8.5 tn A YEAR to the global climate fund?
"Fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists outnumber the combined diplomatic delegations of all 27 European Union nations and the EU combined (233). Major fossil fuel and chemical companies and their lobbyists are particularly well represented.
Nineteen fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists have secured places in the national delegations of Egypt (6), Kazakhstan (4), China (3), Iran (3), Chile (2), and the Dominican Republic (1)."
Chemical pollution:
Many of these chemicals are derived from fossil fuels.
"When these chemicals contaminate our bodies, the results can be disastrous. The report found there were correlational or causal data linking widely used chemicals with threats to human reproductive, immune, neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, liver, kidney and metabolic systems.
“One of the main things that came out strongly was links between pesticide exposure and reproductive issues."
"A new document reveals that one of the world’s largest plastic producers, DuPont, acknowledged as early as 1974 that recycling its plastic products was not possible.
This new discovery also comes against the backdrop of two pending lawsuits alleging that U.S. plastic producers have deceived the public about the feasibility of recycling since the 1980s."
Thanks to @benjamingeer for the link.
If the plastics industry were a country, it’d be the world’s fourth-biggest emitter
https://grist.org/international/the-global-plastics-crisis-explained-in-6-charts/
A handful of countries (plus the fossil fuel industry) are in the way of meaningful progress on the curbing of plastic pollution.
"Consensus" is easily sabotaged by a small number of bad-faith actors. But a global problem needs globally agreed solutions. Is there another way forward?
https://www.ft.com/content/5ddd782c-3b4d-40d8-ab69-90a26af6e063
“Consensus is dead,”
"The final decision, or lack there of, underscored the influence of the United States and other oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, which opposed any limit on the productions of plastics, made mostly from fuels like oil and gas.
The Youth Plastic Action Network was the only organization that spoke at the closing meeting Friday. Comments from observers were cut off at the request of the U.S. and Kuwait.
Talks on a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution in Geneva ended without an agreement Friday. The session was adjourned and will be resumed at a later date. Nations were meeting for an 11th day at the United Nations office to try to complete a landmark treaty to end the plastic pollution crisis. They remain deadlocked over whether the treaty should reduce exponential growth of plastic production and put global, legally binding controls on toxic chemicals used to make plastics. The negotiations at the U.N. hub were supposed to be the last round and produce the first legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, including in the oceans.
"The fossil fuel industry’s public relations campaigns want individuals to focus on their own environmental footprint so that they are distracted from pushing for more structural and policy driven changes. Those structural changes would threaten the profits of the fossil fuel industry."
I find the title of the chart very disturbing.
Billions of people are responsible for 2.7 plastics and they can't just ditch it but require manufacturers of packaging and other goods to be forced by law to stop.
While 0.9 aviation is caused by how many <Millions> individuals and their own personal choices? Let's force them to stop. Today.
That Carbonbrief chose that particular chart title makes me sick. Looking for an alibi for their next flight, are they? NIMBY engraved in golden, friendly letters on their forehead, have they?
Sorry. But this is really sick, entitlement, thoughtless, adolescent, economics-type of "thinking".
Interesting that you read it that way. I saw the graph and said to myself, Boy so many of us understand the importance of staying on the ground and work to curb things like private jet use, and here is something that's an even bigger problem. Puts things in perspective. Need to walk (not fly) and chew gum.
I find it very peculiar by those 2 authors at CarbonBrief to see any importance in this comparison at all.
Look around you office, your kitchen, your bathroom, your laboratory, your server room, your gardening tools, your schoolbus, your train your I dunno, everything. And count the pieces that obviously contain some form of plastics.
Let alone the groceries in your pantry.
Before 1950, there was no plastics at all. Today, it is everywhere and in use and subsequently trashed by almost every human on earth.
And the 2 authors have the audacity to compare the decadent addiction of a few entitled millions flying around the globe for mostly silly purposes
to this fundamental building block of our tech civilisation which plastics has become?
They have once source: fossil fuels.
And they are pushed by the same people.
But yes, of course you are right: the benefits are not evenly spread, and certainly we know who bears the worst of the consequences.
CelloMom On Cars
Paul Wermer, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Tattered
anlomedad
KristFist