Plastic and Proper Waste Management

Global demand for plastics is high and rising, spurred by the material’s barrier properties, lightweight nature, malleability, and favorable production economics. For these reasons, we expect that plastics will continue to play an important role in supply chains globally despite efforts to move away from single-use plastics. But with rising demand comes a significant amount of plastic waste. This creates two related challenges, along with opportunities for businesses to help address them:

• The need to reduce plastic-waste pollution. When plastic waste is not properly managed, it can leak into the environment—most notably, into the ocean near coastal cities.
• The need to increase plastic circularity. Many brand owners have committed to using recycled plastic content in packaging, but the supply has been constrained. Unlocking circular plastics will require addressing collection and building out recycling capacity.

According to the 5 R’s, four actions should be taken, if possible, prior to ‘recycling’: refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, and then recycle. Incorporating this methodology into your business’ waste reduction and recycling efforts will minimize landfill waste and help take your recycling program to the next level. In this post, we explain each of the 5 R’s and the benefits of putting them into practice at your business.

Applying the 5 R’s to your business’ waste management and recycling strategies can positively impact the outcome of your program by significantly reducing the amount of waste your business generates. In the 5 R’s hierarchy, remember to treat recycling as a last resort after attempting to refuse, reduce, reuse, or repurpose.

While it’s difficult to know exactly how many marine animals are killed by plastic pollution, it’s been estimated that plastic pollution kills 100,000 marine mammals every year. 81 out of 123 marine mammal species are known to have eaten or been entangled in plastic, and all seven sea turtle species are affected.

There are two principle ways that encountering marine debris can be fatal for these creatures: ingestion (eating) or entanglement in plastic-based fishing gear.

We currently live in a society where there is overconsumption, and this comes with increased garbage, which is a great problem. Each and every year, we recycle more; however, as we do this, we create more garbage. As we create this problem, few people are on board to help develop solutions. The three R’s, which include reduce, reuse and recycle, all functions by helping to cut down on the amount of waste that people throw away.

Plastic production and consumption has snowballed since large-scale production began in the 1950s. In 2020, an estimated 24 million to 34 million tonnes of plastic waste will enter the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. That is roughly the weight of 21,000 rail locomotives.

And if trends continue without improvements in the way we manage plastic waste, we could be spewing as much as 90 million tonnes of plastic waste into the world’s waters by 2030. Already, an estimated 10,000 tonnes of plastic waste enter the Great Lakes every year.

Back in 2015, the world agreed that eight million tonnes of plastic waste contaminating the ocean alone was unacceptable. Several international platforms emerged to address the crisis, including Our Ocean, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the G7 Ocean Plastic Charter, among others.

For more than a decade, scientists have warned that humankind is leaving so much plastic in the natural environment that future archaeologists will be able to mark this era by the synthetic waste that was left behind—in short, the Plastic Age. This is especially true in the ocean, where about 11 million metric tons of plastic are dumped each year—an amount that is projected to nearly triple by 2040 without urgent, large-scale action, according to research by The Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ, a London-based sustainability consultancy.

Around the world, one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. In total, half of all plastic produced is designed for single-use purposes – used just once and then thrown away.

Plastics including microplastics are now ubiquitous in our natural environment. They are becoming part of the Earth’s fossil record and a marker of the Anthropocene, our current geological era. They have even given their name to a new marine microbial habitat called the “plastisphere”.

Plastic pollution has now been documented in all the major ocean basins, beaches, rivers, lakes, terrestrial environments and even in remote locations such as the Arctic and Antarctic. Estimated global leakage to the environment (terrestrial and aquatic) was 22 Mt in 2019. This value is projected to double, reaching 44 Mt by 2060.

The vast majority are macroplastics, recognisable items such as beverage bottles, and most found their way into the natural environment as a result of inadequate collection and disposal. Other leakage routes include littering or fly-tipping, and marine activities. Microplastics, small pieces of plastic, less than 5 mm (0.2 inch) in length, also make up a sizeable share of total leakage, largely reaching the environment through wear to tyres and road markings, as well as the accidental loss of plastic pellets and washing of synthetic textile fibres.

Plastic accumulating in our oceans and on our beaches has become a global crisis. Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in swirling convergences that make up about 40 percent of the world’s ocean surfaces. At current rates plastic is expected to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050.

Plastics pollution has a direct and deadly effect on wildlife. Thousands of seabirds and sea turtles, seals and other marine mammals are killed each year after ingesting plastic or getting entangled in it. Endangered wildlife like Hawaiian monk seals and Pacific loggerhead sea turtles are among nearly 700 species that eat and get caught in plastic litter.

It’s time to get at the root of this ocean crisis. The Center has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating plastics as a pollutant and is working to stop plastic pollution at the source, before it ever has a chance to reach the ocean.

OECD countries are behind 14% of overall plastic leakage. Within that, OECD countries account for 11% of macroplastics leakage and 35% of microplastics leakage. The Outlook notes that international co-operation on reducing plastic pollution should include supporting lower-income countries in developing better waste management infrastructure to reduce their plastic leakage.

The report finds that the COVID-19 crisis led to a 2.2% decrease in plastics use in 2020 as economic activity slowed, but a rise in littering, food takeaway packaging and plastic medical equipment such as masks has driven up littering. As economic activity resumed in 2021, plastics consumption has also rebounded.

Reducing pollution from plastics will require action, and international co-operation, to reduce plastic production, including through innovation, better product design and developing environmentally friendly alternatives, as well as efforts to improve waste management and increase recycling.

Consumption of plastics is increasing, and as a result more and more plastic waste is being created. The public authorities, together with plastics manufacturers, the waste management sector and retailers, are conducting a review of which options for recycling and disposal are ecologically and economically sound. Plastic waste recycling should deliver ecological added value and be financially viable. Plastics do not belong in the environment!