Plastic waste is present in all the world’s ocean basins, including around remote islands, the poles and in the deep seas. Accumulating in the natural environment, plastics will only decompose over hundreds or even thousands of years.
A majority of marine plastic waste originates from land-based sources and is transported to the ocean through rivers, with the remaining share of debris coming from fishing activities, natural disasters and other sources. Marine debris encompasses large objects, microplastics and nanoplastics, which entangles or is ingested by species who live in them. Microplastics may travel up the food chain and pose potential risks to human health once ingested. Marine litter also leads to a range of socioeconomic impacts to tourism, fishing and aquaculture, and shipping.
- Plastic waste prevention
Plastics waste can be prevented by leveraging incentives along the value chain, as well as by addressing negative externalities associated with plastics production upstream, and plastics waste generation and littering downstream.
Policy interventions to foster plastic waste prevention include the introduction of price signals (e.g. through taxes on disposable plastic goods or deposit-refund schemes for reusable packaging), product bans for particularly harmful products which are prone to leakage but unlikely to be collected and recycled (e.g. microbeads), product durability standards and consumer education campaigns.
- Waste management
Improvement of waste management systems can help ensure adequate end-of-life treatment of plastic waste. It is estimated that between 14 to 18% of waste plastics generated globally are collected for recycling and 24% is incinerated. The remainder is disposed of in landfills, via open burning or uncontrolled dumping, or released to the wider environment.
|
Plastics have become one of the most prolific materials on the planet: in 2015 we produced about 380 million tonnes of plastics globally, up from 2 million tonnes in the 1950s. Yet today only 15% of this plastic waste is collected and recycled into secondary plastics globally each year. This report looks at why this is the case and what we can do about it, as the pervasiveness of plastics has become an urgent public health and planetary problem.
|