To Stem the Rise in International Plastics Pollution, Make It Easier for Big Polluters to Manage Waste
Introduction
One of the most pressing global environmental challenges is avoiding plastics pollution—especially in oceans, where plastics are causing considerable ecological damage. A focus on mitigating plastics pollution has led to new policies in the United States and other developed nations aimed at reducing plastics consumption, with notable prohibitions on straws and bags. But while prohibitions on visible and commonplace plastic use have become increasingly popular, there has been little analysis as to their effectiveness in addressing plastics pollution.
An analytical approach to the issue demonstrates that commonly debated or promoted policies, such as plastic straw bans, are unlikely to have any meaningful impact on mitigating the worsening problem of ocean plastics pollution. Rather, policy focused on improving waste management—especially in countries that contribute primarily to plastics pollution—is far more likely to reduce plastic leakage into the environment.
Future of Plastics Consumption
Historically, global plastic use has risen. Global plastic production has increased by 115 percent since 2000 and was 460 million metric tons in 2019.
In the United States and Western Europe, there has been considerable sentiment against plastic use due to its production via fossil fuels and the potential harms posed by mismanaged plastic waste. Nevertheless, plastic use is expected to rise by considerable volumes both domestically and globally. In the United States, plastic use is expected to rise from 84 million metric tons in 2019 to 138 million metric tons by 2050. China, another major consumer of plastics, is expected to rise from 94 million metric tons of plastic use in 2019 to 178 million metric tons by 2050. Globally, plastic use is expected to rise from 459 million metric tons in 2019 to 977 million metric tons by 2050—an increase of 113 percent.
Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Plastics Outlook
The reason for such heightened plastic use is the increasing reliance on products that cannot easily be made from other materials. Plastics are extremely versatile, can take on virtually any shape, and meet a wide array of structural and flexibility requirements. The use of plastic in packaging—the largest use of plastic—is rising as consumption rises. In fact, global plastic use is increasing across the board for nearly all applications.
This growth is not expected to spread evenly across countries, however. Between 2021 and 2050, plastic use per capita is expected to increase by 44 percent in the United States, 99 percent in China and 266 percent in India. Importantly, plastic use in developing, high-population nations like India and China remains far below that of the United States on a per-capita basis, indicating that plastic usage could increase further.
Sources: R Street Institute estimates based on OECD Global Plastics Outlook and OECD population projections
The data indicate that—consistent with historical trends—the world is on track to see substantially heightened plastic usage, with a general increase across all economies in terms of both total volume and use per capita.
Plastic Waste and Mismanaged Waste
Globally, plastic waste (plastic that is not recycled), is generally high and projected to increase considerably alongside plastic usage. Currently, only 9 percent of global plastic is recycled, with recycling rates at 4 percent in the United States, 8 percent in Europe, 13 percent in China and 13 percent in India.
This increase in plastic waste is expected in almost all countries. However, relative increases in plastic waste are expected to be higher in some developing nations—particularly India, with a projected 343 percent increase in plastic waste by 2050.
Source: OECD Global Plastics Outlook
Plastic waste in and of itself is not a major problem, though. It is typically landfilled, with minimal environmental impact. A much more pressing ecological problem is “mismanaged” plastic waste—that is, plastic waste dispersed into the environment instead of disposed of in landfills or by other means. Although plastic waste is rising considerably worldwide, the global challenge of reducing plastic pollution rests entirely on the effective management of plastic waste.
Sources of plastics pollution do not always correlate with plastic use or plastic waste. For example, even though the United States and China have comparable projected plastic usage, the estimated cumulative plastic leakage to aquatic environments (oceans and rivers) is projected to be more than four times as high for China as for the United States, even though China has better plastic-recycling rates.
Source: OECD Global Plastics Outlook
There is broad heterogeneity of mismanaged plastic waste by country. Some regions—and indeed, specific nations—represent an outsized contribution to plastics pollution and indicate a greater value from action to curb pollution. The following chart highlights select countries and regions, demonstrating just how varied mismanaged plastic waste is per capita.
Source: Our World in Data (Mismanaged plastic waste per capita, 2019)
As the key environmental harm posed by plastics, mismanaged waste should be ameliorated. A number of factors contribute to plastic-waste mismanagement, but a major explanatory factor is the sophistication of local waste-management policies and systems. Rivers carry an estimated 70 to 80 percent of ocean plastic from land-based sources, and the remaining 20 to 30 percent comes from marine sources (e.g., fishing, abandoned vessels). Of the top 10 rivers that emit plastics into the ocean, seven are in the Philippines, two are in India and one is in Malaysia. These plastic-emitting rivers account for at least 18 percent of plastic inputs to oceans.
Research on plastics pollution consistently indicates that the majority of global plastics pollution can be mitigated by improving waste-management practices in a handful of nations. For example, rivers in the Philippines account for approximately 15.3 percent of ocean plastics, while Indian rivers account for 3.9 percent and Malaysian rivers 2.4 percent. Focusing on these three nations alone would address one-fifth of all ocean plastics pollution.
A key question in the issue of plastics pollution is how much leakage could be avoided if the United States and other developed nations substantially curtailed their plastic use. The following chart shows projected plastic leakage into aquatic environments broken down between OECD (typically wealthy, developed nations) and non-OECD nations (often developing nations with emerging economies). Overall, from 2024 to 2050, there is an expected 77 million metric tons of plastic leakage into aquatic environments from OECD nations and 1,103 million metric tons from non-OECD nations. Essentially, even if OECD nations significantly curtailed plastics utilization, it would make little difference to plastics pollution in oceans and rivers. Focusing on the waste-management practices of non-OECD nations has far more pollution-abatement potential.
Source: OECD Global Plastics Outlook
Simply, the data reveal a sharp rise in global plastics use that is projected to continue due to rising population and economic growth. The fundamental challenge with plastics, though, is not in their consumption, but in pollution—especially in leakage to the environment. This problem cannot be remedied by developed nations curtailing consumption because even if such practices could be adopted, most pollution will come from emerging economies. Rather, policy should address plastics pollution directly.
Focus on Waste Management Is Key
Plastics pollution exemplifies a classic collective action problem in economics. Simply put, while the marginal cost to an individual to dump garbage is zero, the cost of proper disposal is greater than zero. Meanwhile, the economic cost to the public from environmental harm caused by dumping is greater than zero but less than the total cost of proper waste disposal. Dumping garbage creates an economic inefficiency because, though pollution incurs a greater net economic cost than waste management does, individuals have an incentive to dump waste: to avoid paying for proper disposal. It is for these reasons that most developed nations enforce laws against dumping garbage.
These challenges are more pronounced in the case of plastics because much of the pollution occurs in the public space rather than on private land. In other words, if someone dumps garbage on another person’s property, the property owner has an incentive and legal recourse to prevent the dumping; however, when plastics end up in the ocean—oftentimes not even within the jurisdiction of a single government—there is no such recourse.
In plastics pollution, we see a collective-action problem at play. Fundamentally, plastics pollution is a waste-management problem rather than a consumption problem. Under the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060, even under aggressive simulations of policy attempts to curtail plastics use, consumption still rises globally. It is unlikely that plastic bans could ever reduce plastics pollution substantially because such bans are pursued primarily in areas where waste is already managed effectively—and emerging economies are unlikely to adopt plastic bans. Plastics use is also projected to increase substantially across virtually all uses, meaning there is no obvious industry to target for policy change.
Reducing plastics pollution is an environmental challenge that we have dealt with before, and it necessitates a more fundamental economic and environmental policy paradigm. The key to reducing plastics pollution is waste management, which requires emphasizing conventional waste-management policy as well as recycling policy.
Conventional Waste Management
Proper waste-management policy is a well-understood issue. Countries with effective waste-management policies impose financial and criminal penalties on polluters while offering public services to landfill, recycle or otherwise dispose of waste. Importantly, waste management is not an issue easily remedied by markets because there is minimal capturable economic value in it other than the improved value of the environment. In other words, there is no profit in garbage collection because people are not willing to pay much for garbage.
India is notorious for its trash “mountains”—heaps of garbage that have been piled up. One such pile is over 200 feet tall. These piles represent failures of public policy in designating services to transport and dispose of waste properly. Of the 2,300 metric tons of solid waste that arrive daily at one of Delhi’s landfills, only 300 metric tons are disposed of.
For comparison, when the United States has had landfills with unsustainable inputs, practices were adjusted to reroute waste to other sites. The Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York, received 28,000 tons of waste per day in the 1970s. The landfill closed in 2001, preventing it from taking in more garbage than it could incinerate or otherwise dispose of and directing waste to other landfills and disposal facilities. In the years after its closure, Fresh Kills began its transformation into a park; the first section opened in 2012.
Essentially, reducing pollution from waste—plastics included—largely depends upon the effectiveness of local waste-management practices and policy.
Recycling
Another important component in reducing global plastics pollution is the innovation and proliferation of recycling methods and the public-policy improvements that support such efforts.
Firstly, a valuable lesson learned in the United States is that market-based policy mechanisms for recycling are far more effective than mandates. For example, deposit refund systems (DRSs) have been used to great effect throughout the country. A DRS is a scheme wherein a consumer pays a fee for a package or item that is repaid to them when they recycle that item. Under DRSs, eligible items have substantially higher rates of recycling—and this particularly applies to plastics.
DRSs work by creating an incentive to recycle that exceeds incentives to pollute. Relatively simple to implement, they are applicable to almost any waste-management system with the capacity to increase recycling volumes.
Secondly, with respect to plastics, an underutilized opportunity exists in the form of “advanced recycling,” or the use of pyrolysis and other methods in the breakdown of plastic waste. Conventionally recycled plastic waste has limited scope and opportunity. Many single-use plastics—including plastic trash bags, the most common recycling contaminant in materials reclamation facilities—are not easily recycled or require special recycling facilities (plastic trash bags are the most common recycling contaminant for materials reclamation facilities). Even plastic that can be broken down and reused can be recycled only a limited number of times due to degradation. Achieving high rates of plastic recycling is difficult, then, given the limited number of practical uses for recycled plastic and a preference for virgin feedstocks.
Advanced recycling does not have the same difficulty. Use of pyrolysis breaks down plastic into its base components without degradation. While the process requires more energy and expense than conventional recycling, it produces a plastic feedstock that is functionally the same as the virgin feedstock, thus creating a larger market of buyers. Additionally, pyrolysis of plastics can produce oil used for liquid fuel. Though this fuel poses the same pollution challenges as conventional fossil fuels, it allows for the establishment of a financial incentive to avoid plastic waste—especially mismanaged plastic waste.
Current plastic-recycling rates are very low, but the advancement of DRSs would substantially increase recycling on the part of plastic consumers while the expansion of advanced recycling would create more buyers and economic opportunities for recycled plastics. This is especially true for emerging economies that may not produce plastics themselves.
Reducing International Plastics Pollution
Fundamentally, waste-management problems are municipal management issues. Part of addressing these issues internationally—especially in emerging economies expected to be the largest contributors to future plastics pollution—is through technical assistance to newer waste-management efforts from established ones. A World Bank report on waste mismanagement in emerging economies recommended that developed countries provide technical assistance through nongovernmental organizations, private enterprise and international funds to promote the importance of proper waste management and the implementation of public law and infrastructure to improve such efforts. Given that considerable pollution extends beyond the borders of the originating country, this would likely be worthwhile and low-cost.
Besides improving technical understanding for waste-management capability in emerging economies, it is also imperative that the mechanisms for international law—namely the United Nations (UN)—produce an enforceable treaty to prohibit the dumping of waste that extends beyond the borders of a nation, particularly in the case of plastics that end up in oceans and international rivers.
Efforts to limit global pollution through international treaties have succeeded in the past. Notably, 1989’s Montreal Protocol prohibited the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that were damaging the ozone layer. The Protocol succeeded thanks to readily available HFC alternatives, which kept compliance costs low.
Another successful international treaty to limit pollution is the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) of 1983, which required oil tankers from participating nations to utilize segregated ballast tanks to limit the impact of oil leakage and spills. Importantly, MARPOL demonstrated that—even in cases where polluters have an incentive to avoid compliance with international law—these treaties can induce compliance by focusing on reducing costs to governments and integrating compliance mechanisms into existing institutions. MARPOL is significant in that it successfully curbed pollution where existing prohibitions on oil leakage from tankers failed. This is because proving and prosecuting oil spillage was difficult, while certifying compliance with MARPOL was comparatively simple.
A similar international effort is needed for plastics. The UN is in the process of drafting a treaty (slated for completion by the end of 2024) that would limit international plastics pollution. Importantly, though, if the treaty is unenforceable or relies on mechanisms that are too difficult or costly for emerging economies to comply with, then it will have little effect. A lesson learned from the Paris Agreement, in which nations voluntarily offer greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets, is that a complete lack of enforcement produces little to no meaningful change in compliance.
The UN effort to curb plastics pollution represents a valuable opportunity to improve global waste-management practices by offering technical assistance and producing an enforceable treaty to mitigate plastic leakage into the environment. But if this effort focuses on curtailing consumption, it is likely to have little effect.
Conclusion
Global plastics use is slated to rise considerably, and there is no reasonable expectation that discrete modifications to plastic consumption in the United States and other developed nations would have a meaningful effect on reducing plastics pollution. Because most plastics pollution originates from emerging economies and, fundamentally, is caused by inadequate waste-management practices, ameliorating these issues should be the primary objective of advocacy efforts aimed at reducing it.
Current UN discussions about producing an enforceable treaty to prohibit plastics pollution are an important step in this direction. Additionally, the United States and developed nations should be leaders in advancing policies that improve plastics recycling, such as DRSs and advanced recycling, and convey their expertise in managing such systems to emerging economies. Essentially, the easiest and simplest solution to reducing plastics pollution is to make it easier for the nations mismanaging plastic waste to adopt better waste-management systems.