Author: Karen Wirsig

There’s still a lot of work to do to get the global treaty we need to end plastic pollution. The recent round of talks at the United Nations Environment Programme HQ in Nairobi, Kenya, didn’t make much progress towards an international treaty to end plastic pollution. It was a disappointment for everyone. Well, except those investors and states that tie their future to drowning the world in oil and plastic. 

Author: Joseph Winters

Amid growing pressure to address the global plastic pollution crisis, many companies are turning to plastic credits — tradable units that represent some amount of plastic litter that’s been removed from the environment. This is convenient for companies that find it too difficult or expensive to reduce the amount of plastic that goes into their products and packaging. Instead, they can buy credits and say they’ve “offset” their plastics footprint.

Author: AP

BERLIN (AP) — The chancellor of Germany and president of Brazil expressed hope Monday that decades-long negotiations might soon yield a finalized free trade agreement between the 27-member European Union and a bloc of four South American nations.

Author: Jared Paben

The U.S. continued to export less scrap fiber and plastic during the first nine months of this year, with notable drops in paper shipped to India and plastic shipped to Mexico.  U.S. companies exported 10.7 million short tons of recovered fiber during the first three quarters of 2023, down 13% from the same period in 2022. For scrap plastics, the U.S. exported 699 million pounds during that period, down 5% from the year before. 

Author: Colin Staub

A long-running comprehensive guide to public drop-off sites accepting plastic film has been taken down, leaving a gap in consumer-facing recycling information for bags and other flexible packaging. The Film Drop-Off Directory, which was housed at BagAndFilmRecycling.org, allowed consumers to enter their location and find the nearest drop-off recycling sites accepting film, primarily retail stores. The directory first launched in California in 2003, and expanded to cover nationwide film recycling information in 2007. It was maintained by Stina Inc. (formerly known as Moore Recycling Associates and later More Recycling), a longtime recycling consulting firm.

Author: David Lepeska

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan touched down in Dubai last Friday, along with countless other high-level Cop28 participants, and soon began listing his country’s climate accomplishments. Turkey sharply reduced its CO2 emissions this year and expects to achieve net-zero emissions by 2053. Its share of electricity generated from renewables is 55 per cent, which ranks 5th in Europe and 12th globally, according to the President. Mr Erdogan also called for more equitable climate finance to further these efforts in Turkey and other emerging economies.

Author: Press Trust of India

The costs of environmental pollution caused by plastics in cigarette butts and packaging amount to an estimated USD 26 billion every year, according to a study. The analysis, published in the journal Tobacco Control, found the costs to be USD 186 billion every 10 years adjusted for inflation in waste management and marine ecosystem damage worldwide.

Author: Evan Simon

After 20 years of operation, a national online recycling directory for plastic bags and plastic films has been taken offline, six months after an ABC News investigation. The Film Drop-Off Directory, once found at BagandFilmRecycling.org, previously directed the public to more than 18,000 store drop-off locations around the country, where they could bring used plastic bags and film to be recycled. Visitors to the site today are greeted with a message informing them that "the resource is no longer available."

Author: Tadesse Amera

Last year, 175 nations agreed to develop a legally binding agreement to tackle plastic pollution. One year from now, these countries will conclude negotiations for the world’s first international Plastics Treaty, which aims to stem the health and environmental threats we face from toxic plastics. Recent negotiations however indicate the need to avoid false solutions and focus on the root causes of the plastics problem.

Author: Aidan Charron

For the last 70 years, we have all been lab rats in the biggest health experiment of human history, one that none of us signed up for, least of all our children. In the run-up to attending the global plastic treaty negotiations in Nairobi, I was feeling frustrated about the coverage of microplastics and their impact on human health, so I wrote a report, Babies v Plastics. I wanted to emphasise that these tiny, insidious fragments of plastic are associated with not just one health risk, but with an entire range of health issues, from elevated miscarriage rates to early puberty.

Author: Sarah J. Morath

Plastic pollution has spread to Earth’s farthest reaches, with widespread effects on wildlife, the environment and human health. To curb this problem, U.N. member countries are negotiating a global treaty to reduce plastic pollution, which they aim to complete by the end of 2024. That effort is well underway. In September 2023, the U.N. Environment Programme released the so-called zero draft – a first iteration of ideas and goals that emerged from the first two rounds of negotiations. And in November 2023, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution met in Nairobi, Kenya, for the third negotiating round of a planned five sessions.

Author: Philippa Nuttall

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Today’s enlightened consumers may shun plastic straws and avoid plastic bags — indeed, legislators give them no choice in many jurisdictions — but they are swimming against a mighty tide. Plastic’s cheapness, lightness and versatility make it economically irresistible, even though the environmental downsides are severe.

Author: Beatriz Santos

The European Council and Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on Nov. 17 to ban exports of non-hazardous plastic waste to countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of mostly rich countries. The proposed regulation builds on the provisions of the Basel Convention that already bans exports of hazardous waste from the EU to third countries. The European Council said in a statement that since the adoption of the regulation in 2006, exports from the EU to non-OECD countries have ‘increased considerably’. According to the Basel Action Network (BAN), EU plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries rose to 50 million kg/month in May 2023 from 28.1 million kg/month in May 2022, equivalent to 303 shipping containers per day.

Author: Tatiana Schlossberg

Someday, if future forms of intelligent life look for evidence of human existence in the 20th and 21st centuries, they should have an easy time finding us in the geologic record. Just look for the plastic. Between 1950 and 2021, humanity produced about 11 billion metric tons of virgin plastic — that’s the weight of 110,000 U.S. aircraft carriers. Only about 2 billion tons of this is still in use. The rest — some 8.7 billion tons — is waste: 71 percent has ended up in landfills or somewhere else in the environment, including the ocean; 12 percent has been recycled; 17 percent has been incinerated. At the rate we’re going, global plastic waste will rise 60 percent by 2050.

Author: EHN Editors

An examination of recycled plastic pellets from several countries found they contain hundreds of hazardous chemicals, according to this recent study published by Data in Brief.