Plastic Pollution Treaty Talks Deadlocked as Negotiations Draw To a Close (pbs.org) 17
Negotiations on a global treaty to end plastic pollution are drawing to a close Thursday, as nations remain deadlocked over whether to tackle the exponential growth of plastic production. From a report: A draft of the treaty released Wednesday wouldn't limit plastic production or address chemicals used in plastic products. Instead, it's centered on proposals where there's broad agreement -- such as reducing the number of problematic plastic products that often enter the environment and are difficult to recycle, promoting the redesign of plastic products so they can be recycled and reused, and improving waste management.
It asks nations to make commitments to ending plastic pollution, rather than imposing global, legally-binding rules. French President Emmanuel Macron said the "lack of ambition" in the draft treaty was unacceptable, and that agreeing to a global treaty against plastic pollution "is our opportunity to make a difference."
It asks nations to make commitments to ending plastic pollution, rather than imposing global, legally-binding rules. French President Emmanuel Macron said the "lack of ambition" in the draft treaty was unacceptable, and that agreeing to a global treaty against plastic pollution "is our opportunity to make a difference."
plastic jesus (Score:1)
I don't care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car,
Through my trials and tribulations
And my travels through the nation
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far
"problematic plastic products" (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, does that include all the commercial fishing gear? As usual the worst polluters are big industries, but we get blamed for using plastic straws.
Re: (Score:2)
You're making that up. You NEVER got blamed for USING plastic straws. We blamed the manufacturers for making them, not people for buying them. That's why the manufacturers got prohibited from SELLING disposable plastic items (e.g. straws) to consumers, but consumers were never blamed (e.g. fined by police) for USING them. (You might get blamed for littering, though.) In general the blame is (as always) on the economical agents, not on the consumers.
We need to ban nearly all single-use plastics. We obviously
Re: (Score:1)
Where exactly did this ban on plastic straws happen?
I remember a couple years back seeing paper straws offered and places.....but that's long since disappeared from anywhere I live or visit.
And I've never seen plastic straws disappear here....
Re: (Score:2)
There is a formal ban in the EU, directive 2019/904 in force July 3, 2021. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/... [europa.eu] . For the US this link https://www.greenmatters.com/p... [greenmatters.com] has a list of places that enacted a special status on plastic straw (if I understood, that they cannot be offered by default, you only get one if you specifically request for one) and list of franchises which are phasing them out.
Re: (Score:2)
The worst polluters are the Chinese and Indians. The amount of plastics pollution flowing out of either the Ganges or Huang He dwarfs the rest of the world combined. This doesn't even get into the industrial pollution coming out of the Ganges which is in a decade or two going to turn the majority of the Indian Ocean into a giant dead zone.
Another production only tax agreement (Score:2)
How many summits and agreements and treaty negotiations are needed that 95% focus on plastic production do we need before we have one on the actual polluters?
- limits measured by actual observations of plastics flowing from rivers into the oceans
- monetary penalties or international taxes paid by countries dumping excessive plastic in the ocean
- the largest ocean polluters by tons of plastic via rivers paying international commercial contracting companies (not the UN or other NGO) to physically pick up and
addicted to oil (Score:3)
Plastic production and fuel production go hand in glove. As long as we insist on one, we will have both.
What's not in the abstract (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The Ganges and Huang He rivers are by far the largest plastics polluters in the world, and the Ganges is the most polluted large river in the world period.
We can't even solve easy problems (Score:3)
This is why I suspect humanity is doomed. It's because we suck. When faced with problems of global significance, everyone puts their personal short term benefit above the future of humanity, and we don't do anything.
It's not like this is even a hard problem. We know what we need to do. We already have the technology to do it. A lot of it just means switching back to older technologies that work just fine. The only real obstacle is people who make more money from not solving it. So we don't even do the really easy things, never mind the harder ones. Why can't the bag of tortilla chips I buy at the grocery go back to being made of paper like it used to be instead of plastic? No reason at all, except that the plastic bag costs the manufacturer a fraction of a cent less. Multiply that by thousands of products sold to billions of people and you get massive pollution. We could easily eliminate so much of it at very low cost.
But we won't do it.
...because we can't compromise (Score:2)
Why can't the bag of tortilla chips I buy at the grocery go back to being made of paper like it used to be instead of plastic?
For things like that I completely agree. Similarly the new bamboo spoons and forks are just as good as the plastic ones they replaced, if not better and stronger. However, try using a wooden knife or a paper straw and you'll see that there are limits. What I'd like to see is a more sensible approach where we replace the obvious things with non-plastic alternatives and work on finding solutions for the rest. However, in today's world it seems that either you have to support replacing everything immediately
Democracy (Score:2)
Modern democracy is not well suited to addressing long term problems. The problem needs to get pretty clear and present before the electorate will start asking their representative to do something.
It's like that with modern media too. Media used to have a sort of parental attitude. Smart people would broadcast what they thought was good for the populace. Modern media content is voted for in real time by the populace itself, meaning that those smart voices are diluted by all the rest.
For democracy purists, a
WHO SPECIFICALLY IS POLLUTING AND HOW? (Score:2)
What countries dump plastic in rivers and oceans along with their trash? (Waste should be sorted and treated ashore, not dumped into a global food source.)
running out (Score:1)
Europe is running out of feet to shoot themselves in.