[PARIS] Lower than 10 per cent of the plastic used the world over is recycled, the OECD mentioned Tuesday, calling for “coordinated and international options” forward of anticipated talks on a world treaty on the difficulty.
A brand new report by the Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Improvement report discovered that 460 million tonnes of plastics had been used final yr, the quantity almost doubling since 2000.
The quantity of plastic waste had greater than doubled throughout that point to 353 million tonnes, the Paris-based OECD mentioned.
“After considering losses throughout recycling, solely 9 per cent of plastic waste was in the end recycled, whereas 19 % was incinerated and virtually 50 per cent went to sanitary landfills,” it mentioned in its International Plastics Outlook.
“The remaining 22 per cent was disposed of in uncontrolled dumpsites, burned in open pits or leaked into the surroundings.” The Covid-19 pandemic noticed the usage of plastics drop by 2.2 per cent in 2020 in contrast with the earlier yr. Nevertheless single-use plastics rose and general use is “projected to choose up once more” because the economic system rebounds.
Plastics contributed 3.4 per cent of worldwide greenhouse emissions in 2019, 90 per cent of it from “manufacturing and conversion from fossil fuels”, the report mentioned.
Within the face of rampant international warming and air pollution, “it should even be essential that international locations reply to the problem with coordinated and international options”, OECD Secretary-Common Mathias Cormann mentioned within the report.
The OECD proposed a collection of “levers” to deal with the difficulty, together with growing the marketplace for recycled plastics, which solely symbolize six per cent of the entire – largely as a result of they’re dearer.
It added that new applied sciences associated to reducing the environmental footprint of plastics was just one.2 per cent of all innovation regarding the product.
Whereas calling for “a extra round plastics lifecycle”, the OECD mentioned that insurance policies should additionally restrain general consumption.
It additionally referred to as for “main investments in fundamental waste administration infrastructure”, together with US$28 billion a yr to go in the direction of efforts in low and middle-income international locations.
The experiences comes lower than per week earlier than the UN Setting Meeting begins on February 28 in Nairobi, the place formal talks are anticipated to start on a future plastics treaty, the scope of which continues to be unclear.
In response to a survey revealed Tuesday by polling agency Ipsos for the World Wildlife Fund carried out in 28 international locations, a median of 88 per cent of respondents mentioned a world treaty to fight plastic air pollution was “pretty necessary (23 per cent), “crucial” (31 per cent) or “important (34 per cent). AFP