PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that plastics pollution around the world was a “time bomb” as diplomats started five days of negotiations in Paris to make progress on a deal to end plastic waste.
Representatives of 175 countries with divergent ambitions gathered at the UNESCO headquarters to make progress towards reaching, by 2024, a historic treaty covering the whole plastics life cycle.
As the talks started, the chief of the negotiations Gustavo Meza-Cuadra Velazquez said the challenge was immense, but not insurmountable.
Macron urged participating countries to end today’s unsustainable and globalised production model, where richer nations export plastic waste to poorer countries.
He said in a video message that the fossil-fuel-based material has created a risk to global warming targets, human health, and biodiversity.
He added that the first priorities of the talks should be to slash production of plastics and to ban ” the most polluting items like single-use plastics.
Annual plastic production
The stakes are high, as the annual plastics production has more than doubled in twenty years to 460 million tonnes and is going to triple within four decades.
Two-thirds of this production is discarded after being used once or a few times and ends up as waste. Over a fifth is illegally burned or dumped, and less than 10% is recycled.
The chief of the UN Environment Program, Inger Andersen, told the negotiators that a throwaway plastic culture was choking ecosystems, gushing pollution galore, warming the climate and damaging human health and that the most vulnerable were the hardest affected.
