Already a subscriber?When it comes to plastic waste, the numbers are alarming. And they’re getting worse. According to the OECD, 91 per cent of all plastic used goes into nature, oceans, landfill or incineration every year – that’s 320 million tons. By 2060, there will be an additional 30 billion tons. Only 5 billion tons are predicted to be recycled.
The business of plastic recycling is economically fragile at best – and in many ways it is also broken. For example, a substantial portion of Europe’s plastic recycling capacity has disappeared in the past two years due to unsustainable trading conditions brought on by the drop in the price of oil. Now imagine you’re an investor or an entrepreneur looking to invest $US10 million in an expensive plastic recycling facility.
Discussions about the plastic treaty have so far surfaced very few ideas on this front. Other than a global sinking fund from UN member states, which few taxpayers are likely to be happy about, the draft treaty is eerily silent. What makes this transformative is that the projects which receive the money pay it back using plastic credits, with each plastic credit representing a ton of plastic removed from nature and a ton of plastic diverted from landfill. Underlying this financing mechanism is a regulatory framework called the, which independently monitors, measures and verifies the environmental impact of the projects.