The global plastics crisis explained in 6 charts

Since plastic began to be produced in series in the 1950s, the material developed in the environment and in the body of people. These five graphs illustrate how bad the problem is and why the delegates of more than 170 countries have committed to negotiating a global and legally binding treaty to “put an end to plastic pollution”. The second part of the fifth round of talks started on Tuesday and is expected to take place until August 14 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The world produced 2 million metric tonnes of plastic in 1950. This number doubled at 4 million in 1955, then doubled at 8 million in 1960 and increased exponentially since. In 2019, Le Monde produced around 460 million metric tonnes of plastic each year – about the same weight as 88 large pyramids of Giza.

Fossil fuel companies plan to produce even more plastic in the coming decades. According to an estimate of 2022 of the organization of economic cooperation and development, or OECD – an intergovernmental group which publishes political reports and analyzes – world production will reach 1.2 billion tonnes by 2060, unless a kind of restriction is introduced. This represents more than 3,600 times the weight of the State Building Empire.

The arrows of plastic production made life more practical by making consumer goods and lighter and cheaper packaging. But that also caused huge waste management problems. Unlike industry allegations, plastic recycling does not work on a large scale: only 9% of the plastic that the world creates is transformed into a new product – and less than 1% is never recycled more than once.

Most plastics – about 49% of it – are sent to the discharges. Another 19% is burned in incinerators and 22% is classified by the OECD as “poorly managed” – an understatement which means that it is burned in open wells, thrown into unofficial discharges or strewn in rivers and seas. Large pieces of plastic litter tangled and stifle the fauna, and the small fragments in which they penetrate – known as microplastics – read the dangerous chemicals which can more compromise animals and ecosystems.

The OECD estimates that 22 million metric tonnes of plastic waste escaped in the environment in 2019. In a scenario between business, in which petrochemical companies continue to increase plastic production, pollution should exceed waste management and recycle even more than 6 million metric tonnes per 2060.

Plastics do not only threaten the environment; They also threaten human health, partly because of their constitutive chemicals. A scientific article published last month in the journal Nature identified 16,325 known plastic chemicals. Many are used as treatment aids, or as additives which give plastic certain properties such as malleability. Among these chemicals, 4,219 – more than a quarter – are known to have dangerous properties in people or animals, such as carcinogenicity or bioacculating capacity, raising the food chain as larger animals by eating smaller animals. Most other chemical products – 10,726, or 66% of the total – have never been assessed for toxicity.

Global health and environmental agreements such as the Stockholm Convention cover less than 1,000 chemicals related to plastics. This means that 15,345 – approximately 94% of the total – is not subject to international regulations. Researchers who are part of the coalition of scientists for an effective plastic treaty say that this gap has unacceptable human health risks which should be discussed by the United Nations Agreement, ideally via legally binding lists of chemical groups that signatories of treaties must eliminate.

In addition to being public health and an environmental scourge, plastics are also increasingly recognized as a problem of climate change. They are made from fossil fuels, after all. According to a study published last year by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, plastics were responsible for around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. That year, industry emissions were almost equivalent to those of India.

More recent research of the Plastics & Climate project has identified significant data gaps on the climate footprint of plastics. In a systematic journal published in April, they called for a more in -depth overview of the release of greenhouse According to existing plastic pollution, the effects of plastic pollution on the quantity of heat that the earth traps and the potential of microplastics to inhibit natural processes that seach carbon on the bottom of the ocean.

Decisions made during plastic treaties negotiations will determine the future of plastic pollution. The most effective intervention, according to the modeling of a team of scientists from the University of California in Berkeley and the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a global production ceiling. But other less controversial policies – such as more recycling and financing infrastructure for waste management – would also help. An ambitious scenario combining a production ceiling And These recycling and funding policies could prevent nearly 78 million metric tonnes of annual plastic pollution by 2050.