Arms aloft, the president of the United Nations Environment Assembly triumphantly told delegates in Kenya: “Plastic pollution has grown into an epidemic. With today’s resolution, we are officially on track for a cure” in November 2023. Three years on, governments have not yet agreed on a global instrument to combat plastic waste, but the ambition and willingness remain. Success, however, is closely linked to systems change, which is urgently needed if we are to change the current trajectory. 

Plastic remains closely intertwined with modern life. It keeps medicines and food safe and affordable, and it makes a vital contribution to the way we live, consume, work and travel. With it comes the issue of plastic waste. Yet, plastic waste is a solvable problem despite the scale and diversity of the challenge.  

A future international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution could provide a coherent policy framework for industry, governments, civil society and financial institutions to carry out coordinated action. But that’s just the start. The key to success will be implementation of the instrument — deploying the solutions and funding the systems change needed to vastly improve waste management and increase recycling rates to drive a circular economy for plastics. 

Prioritizing collaboration over compulsion 

To achieve lasting change, the instrument must provide mechanisms to unlock financial support for waste management infrastructure and innovation. With an estimated $2.1 trillion needed by 2040 to eliminate plastic leakage into the environment, it is imperative that we look for innovative ways to mobilize capital from a diverse range of sources. Every dollar of capital committed to the right project can potentially catalyze ten times that amount from larger institutions.  

Every dollar of capital committed to the right project can potentially catalyze ten times that amount from larger institutions.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste has direct experience of this. To provide just one example, we made a critical loan to a women-led social enterprise in Indonesia that allowed it to navigate equity requirements and to secure a $44.9 million Asian Development Bank loan to develop a bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Java. 

Our work on the ground has demonstrated the significant potential of coordinated action and a systems-based approach. For example, by providing our technical expertise and financial support to the ASASE Foundation — a Ghana-based social enterprise that supports women entrepreneurs in managing plastic waste collection and recycling businesses — the foundation successfully developed a functional system and became a recipient of the World Bank’s Plastic Waste Reduction-Linked Bond. The bond provides investors with a financial return linked to plastic and carbon credits expected to be generated, allowing the ASASE Foundation to benefit from financing that significantly exceeds our initial investment. 

In developed countries, where we are more focused on addressing plastic waste through technology, a coordinated approach has also been pivotal to progress. HolyGrail 2.0, a digital watermarking technology that we support, is a good example of this. The imperceptible codes contained in the watermarks and printed on plastic packaging carry information about the material and can be detected by high resolution cameras in sorting facilities to increase sorting accuracy and improve the quality of material bound for recycling. The project has involved significant collaboration across the plastics value chain, involving technology providers, sorting facilities, brands and governments, enabling the technology to be successfully proven in a series of industrial trials in Europe.   

Reliable and consistent definitions and reporting metrics, both heavily discussed at the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee sessions, are fundamental to the future instrument’s long-term and lasting impact. These will not only establish how much plastic is used, its purpose, the levels of waste and where it ends up, but also allow businesses and governments to develop the most impactful responses and introduce accountability.   

Reliable and consistent definitions and reporting metrics […] are fundamental to the future instrument’s long-term and lasting impact.

They will also guard against a cumbersome ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that underestimates the complexity of the plastic waste challenge and puts progress at risk. Indeed, the flexibility of countries to design action plans that acknowledge and address specific national circumstances is vital, as is the need for the treaty to encourage greater collaboration between nations and actors across the entire plastics ecosystem. 

Resetting the dial 

As an organization that is focused on developing and implementing solutions, we have learnt a lot over the past five years. As the world looks for how to scale practical solutions to the challenges of plastic waste, the alliance is concentrating on larger-scale efforts in the Global South where underdeveloped waste management infrastructure represents an outsized opportunity for plastic waste reduction. These programs, aligned with countries’ national priorities, will begin in India, Indonesia and South Africa — each receiving at least $100 million in collective financing. The scale of these efforts and their ability to provide a practical model that other nations can replicate will help to move countries up the recycling maturity curve. 

In parallel, we will be carrying out significant efforts to tackle systemic plastic waste issues in the Global North with a focus on film and flexible plastics. Commonly used in packaging and consumer goods, flexible packaging is notoriously difficult to recycle. This is a problem for every consumer packaging goods company, retailer and municipality. The key to success will be bringing together all the different stakeholders of this complex ecosystem around a cohesive strategy. 

A time for action 

A fully circular economy for plastics can only be achieved through systems change. We are optimistic that the delegates at the upcoming negotiations in Geneva will create a framework to catalyze collaborative progress, but this is just one piece of the puzzle. What countries really need is the ability to implement the right solutions and infrastructure, which is only possible with cooperation across the entire plastics ecosystem.  

What countries really need is the ability to implement the right solutions and infrastructure, which is only possible with cooperation across the entire plastics ecosystem.

More details of the Alliance’s work can be found on our website.