If all goes according to plan, by the end of the year, some 170 countries will finalize the world’s first legally binding treaty to curtail plastic pollution. Its success will depend in no small part on money: creating a funding pipeline so that signatories, especially in the Global South, can execute the promises they agree to. For the moment, the specifics of this financing remain bound up in diplomatic haggling. Still, countries broadly agree that billions of dollars are a necessary, if modest, starting point; modeling studies have pegged the need anywhere between $3 trillion and $17 trillion. Disagreements center on how to raise it, who should administer it, and what to spend it on. But these differences are unlikely to sink a treaty whose urgency has never been more apparent to national leaders. Each year some 20 million metric tons of plastic, roughly the mass of 200 aircraft carriers, enter the environment. Microscopic shreds of the stuff are increasingly found not just in nature’s remotest reaches, including Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench, but throughout the human body, with unknown consequences. And with production of this petrochemical-derived material set to skyrocket – possibly tripling by 2060 — plastic pollution and climate action are increasingly considered joined at the hip. Whatever form the treaty takes, it’s likely to prioritize one popular line item: expanding waste management, like trash systems and recycling, in the Global South. A good place to start addressing the problem, the thinking goes, is to get it out of nature and into landfills and recycling plants. Worldwide, 2.7 billion people live without regular refuse collection. As garbage volumes surge across the developing world, growing quantities of degrading plastic litter filter into rivers, lakes, and oceans. This has put the spotlight on waste management as a low-tech, politically palatable way to curtail plastic pollution.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, which represents 38 industrial countries, says a comprehensive package of measures — tackling plastic’s whole lifespan, from production to disposal — could eliminate 95 percent of the pollution by 2040. Such steps include taxing plastic, banning some single-use items, and redesigning goods so they don’t have to be thrown in the trash. But it also called a $2.1 trillion expansion of old-fashioned waste infrastructure, like landfills, recycling plants, and the logistics systems that supply them, a “crucial prerequisite.” To meet the goals, it estimated, the world must recycle about 40 percent of its plastic. Today it recycles about 9 percent. A key target is Southeast Asia, where roughly a third of all marine plastic originates. There are several reasons for this. Rising living standards have boosted consumption of consumer goods, like soft drinks and takeout meals, packaged in single-use plastic. Europe, Japan, and the U.S. continue to offload hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste to the region each year, not all of it legally. With many population centers near coastlines and waterways, any mismanaged waste gets a free ride to the sea. The governments of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, have not invested nearly enough to fix this, mostly because they cannot afford to. Landfills, garbage trucks and recycling systems cost a lot, but aren’t very profitable. For cash-strapped governments facing multiple crises – pandemics, climate disasters, poverty – building even basic waste infrastructure can quickly fall by the wayside.
Many of the 670 million people who live in the association’s member states have no one to take their trash. People in boats collect plastic from the heavily polluted Citarum River at Batujajar in Bandung, West Java, on June 12. Timur Matahair / AFP via Getty Images “So what do you do when it’s not collected?” said Umesh Madhavan, research director at The Circulate Initiative, a nonprofit focused on ocean plastic pollution and the circular economy. “You dump it or dig a pit and bury it. Or you try and burn it.” That is a common outcome for much of the refuse in Southeast Asia, where by one estimate, only about a third of waste gets any form of management — like landfills, recycling plants or incinerators. The number is closer to 100 percent in the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
For that reason, research suggests, basic waste management can bring outsize benefits. Last year a study by data scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara identified five relatively simple and straightforward actions that could go a long way towards eliminating 89 percent of mismanaged plastic globally; improving trash and recycling systems were among them. In the OECD’s most ambitious scenario — which envisions a 95 percent reduction in plastic leakage by 2040 — these types of measures deliver three-quarters of the drop.
“Downstream” solutions — that is, addressing plastic at the end of its life — will find supporters in Southeast Asia, where the governments of Malaysia and the Philippines have joined domestic petrochemical and manufacturing interests to promote “waste-to-energy” and “co-processing” plants as solutions to clear backlogged waste. These operations, which burn plastic to generate electricity or produce cement, are common in rich countries. But ASEAN environmentalists call them “false solutions” that release noxious and planet-warming pollutants while failing to tackle the root issues of the plastic crisis. Some scientists and environmentalists in the developing world say a treaty centered on waste management is bound to fail. They say experience shows no number of landfills or recycling plants can contend with the volume of plastic they’re seeing.
“Nobody is talking about the production side of things. We’re just talking about how we can deal with the waste,” said Hema Mahadevan, a public engagement campaigner for Greenpeace Malaysia. “If you really want to cut down on plastic waste, then you should really start from the top. Go to the source of the problem.” Jorge Emmanuel, a Filipino chemical engineer and former technical advisor for the United Nations Development Program, said the Philippines’ waste systems are broken in ways infrastructure can’t fix. A 2023 study found it has the world’s highest per capita rate of plastic released to the ocean, at about 7 pounds a year. Emmanuel said the country has tough laws supporting recycling and prohibiting illegal dumps, but officials don’t enforce them. That’s why he and others are urging treaty writers to invert how they think about waste: Focus on reducing the amount of plastic in the system, with waste management as a last resort. “I’m in public health, and we say prevention is better than cure,” he said. “If you put money into preventing the problem, you’ll spend less to take care of the problem afterward.”
He and others with extensive firsthand experience with the region’s plastic pollution have a few suggestions for those crafting the treaty. The first is to direct money and supportive policies toward entrepreneurial solutions. Southeast Asia, for instance, has in recent years seen a blossoming of projects and small-scale enterprises that hint at what a low-plastic economy might look like. On the Vietnamese resort island of Phu Quoc, a startup called Greenjoy has persuaded local businesses to replace 1 million plastic straws with those made of lepironia, a local grass. An initiative in the Philippines has equipped 1200 sari-sari stores, the local equivalent of bodegas or corner stores, to dispense liquid detergent, dishwashing soap, and fabric conditioner in bulk to customers who bring their own containers. The products are made by local manufacturers rather than global corporations, and they’re cheaper. The project directors claim this has replaced thousands of thin plastic packages called sachets that are virtually impossible to recycle. Members of Greenpeace Indonesia stage a protest against the plastic waste generated by Unilever’s products outside the company’s office in Tangerang, a suburb of Jakarta, on June 20. Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP via Getty Images But such efforts have struggled to scale, often for lack of money. Businesses tackling plastic pollution often fall into a “missing middle” where they’re too big to receive microfinance, venture or philanthropic funding, but too risky for bank loans, said Madhavan. He and others said this financing gap could be plugged with funding from the plastic treaty, or by cash from corporations that need to comply with regulations. New financing tools could help. In January the World Bank launched an experimental bond that will raise $14 million to help community-recycling projects in Indonesia and Ghana expand.…
