To curb plastic pollution, industry and academia must unite!

From the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench, pieces of plastic are found almost everywhere on Earth. Specks have even been found in human blood and breast milk. This pervasiveness is just one aspect of a global crisis that encompasses the entire life cycle of plastics.

More than 95% of plastics are currently manufactured using fossil fuels. In 2019 alone, the carbon footprint from their production reached 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, or 3.7% of global greenhouse-gas emissions — around twice as much as is generated by aviation.

About half of the plastic produced is used only once³ and, in 2019, 353 million tonnes of plastic waste were generated (see Nature 616, 234–237; 2023). Only 9% of that waste was recycled, and 19% was incinerated — lowering air quality. The rest was disposed of in landfill sites (49%) or, worse, was mismanaged (22%): burnt in the open or discarded in the environment through littering or illegal dumping.

Preliminary studies suggest that plastic pollutants have the potential to disturb crucial Earth system processes (such as nutrient cycling in soils) and to affect local weather patterns by promoting cloud formation. They could even serve as a marker for a potential new geological era shaped by human activity — the Anthropocene epoch.

As demand for plastics continues to soar, with annual production expected to nearly triple from around 460 million tonnes in 2019 to about 1,230 million tonnes in 2060, researchers in academia and industry are searching for ways to reduce their environmental cost. However, these efforts are often incremental and siloed. Progress is too slow. Academic and industrial groups need to team up to solve the problems faster.

One solution to the global plastic problem is to shift from a linear economy (take–make–waste) to a circular one (see ‘Making plastics go round’), in which products are designed to be used, reused, repurposed and recycled as much as possible. Each step should generate little to no waste.

Substantial investment in the past decade or so has yielded progress, but a lot more work is needed to truly realize a circular economy. For example, polymers have been developed that are amenable to chemical recycling technologies, but it is not yet known how scalable their production is, nor how long they will persist in the environment. Some bioplastics have been made from renewable biomass sources instead of refined crude oil. These products both meet the needs of consumers and take only months to break down in the environment. They are more sustainable than conventional plastics, and demand for them is rising. However, their costs are often higher than those of conventional materials and it is not yet clear whether they can effectively replace distinct types of plastic for different applications.

Plastics are here to stay — they can be replaced by other materials for some applications, but not all. The enormous use of personal protective equipment and disposable food and drink containers and utensils during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an illustration. What matters is which plastics are used and what their fate is at the end of their life. Materials must be identified that are sustainably sourced, meet the approval and rising demand of consumers, and have acceptable end-of-life scenarios, thereby enabling a more-circular economy.

The plastic industry has certainly had a role in the current plastic pollution crisis, but so has consumers’ unchecked demand for plastic goods. Although some uses of plastic are out of their hands (such as the packaging of products), consumers can, to some extent, control the amount of goods they purchase and how they manage their waste (for example, by not littering). And the lag in adopting legislation to help curb plastic pollution has also played a part. Plastics were first detected in the ocean more than 50 years ago, incidentally by scientists working at WHOI, yet a global treaty to enable a circular economy and to limit the leakage of plastic waste into the environment is only now being negotiated.

A Guest Editorial