The world can’t recycle its way out of the plastics crisis
Author: Carroll Muffett
The International Energy Agency projects that by 2050, more than half of all oil and gas will be used to make plastics and petrochemicals. This has enormous climate impacts. While the civil society voices struggled to be heard at the COP27 United Nations climate talks that ended on November 20, 2022 in Sharm EL - Sheikh, Egypt, the fossil fuel industry faced no such challenge, sending a record of 36 lobbyist to the talk. It is not surprising that the countries attending the talk failed to confront fossil fuel that are primary cause of the climate change despite urgent calls from more than 80 countries to do so. Governments and observers alike denounced the outcome as a "fiasco" that did little to avert future climate disasters. That fiasco at Sharm EL - Sheikh, and the decades of inertia preceding it, offer critical and timely lessons for nation as they meet next week to begin negotiating a new legally binding treaty on a closely related challenge: global plastic crisis.