“Plastic pollution is a time bomb as well as an already present scourge,” insisted the President of the Republic.
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Emmanuel Macron called for “an end to a globalized and unsustainable model” of production and consumption of plastic, Monday, for the resumption in Paris of negotiations on a future global treaty against this major pollution. “If we do nothing, the generation of plastic waste will triple again by 2060. Plastic pollution is therefore a time bomb as well as a scourge already present”, declared the French president in a video message to representatives of 175 nations gathered at UNESCO headquarters until Friday.
According to the Head of State, “we must definitively put an end to a globalized and unsustainable model which consists of producing plastic in China or in OECD countries. [Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, NDLR] and then export it in the form of waste to developing countries, which are nevertheless less well equipped with waste treatment systems”.
“The primary objective must be to reduce the production of new plastics and to ban the most polluting products – such as single-use plastics – and the most dangerous to health as soon as possible”, explains Emmanuel Macron. While “only 15% of plastic is recycled globally”, “100% of plastics put on the market must tomorrow be fully recyclable”, he continues, pleading, like fifty other countries, for an end of plastic pollution by 2040.
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Macron wants to innovate “harder and faster”
“We also need to give ourselves the means to innovate harder, and faster, to replace plastic with truly ecological alternatives,” said Emmanuel Macron. And he believes that it is necessary “better to share solutions, technologies, and ensure solidarity vis-à-vis the poorest countries”. Negotiations are delicate between countries with divergent ambitions to try to reach a historic agreement covering the entire life cycle of plastic.
The President of the Republic recalls “the objective of arriving at an approved text by the end of 2024, one year before the United Nations conference on the ocean in Nice”.
Annual production has more than doubled in twenty years to reach 460 million tonnes.
However, two-thirds of this global production has a short lifespan and becomes waste to be managed after just one or a few uses. 22% are abandoned (wild dumps, open-air incineration or discharge into nature) and less than 10% are recycled.