“We have no other solution than to reduce the production of plastic“, underlined the navigator and honorary president of WWF Isabelle Autissier, this Monday, May 29 on franceinfo, while the second round of negotiations opens in Paris to try to draw up a legally binding treaty by the end of 2024 under the aegis of the United Nations to end plastic pollution.
The stakes are high as annual production has more than doubled in 20 years to reach 460 million tonnes. “It has become an absolutely colossal and absolutely global issue“, she assures.
franceinfo: The first objective of the future plastic treaty will be the “reduction of the use and production of plastic”. Should countries be forced or trusted to reduce plastic production?
Isabelle Autissier: We are going to have to arrive at binding commitments. You can’t just trust goodwill. The constraint can relate to the producers, the constraint can also be in terms of taxation of certain products. Today, for the States, a kilo of plastic costs ten times more in depollution than in production. What is at stake is so high that yes, we will have to convince, but we will have to convince that it is in the interest of all States to get rid of this scourge.
Several countries, including European countries and France, seem to be willing on the issue, with the priority of stopping producing plastic and no longer highlighting recycling, which is rather pushed by professionals in the sector…
We realize that recycling works extremely poorly because we have multiple plastics. You can’t make “new plastic” out of old plastic. We are always obliged to partly reintroduce new plastic. With recycling, the objective of reducing plastics in circulation is therefore not met. And then plastic production doubles roughly every 20 years.
Here, the focus must be on single-use plastics because for a few seconds of use, it is several hundred years in the environment and in our bodies. We have no other solution than to reduce the production of plastic because we find more and more of it in nature.
As a sailor, do you see the ravages of plastic on the oceans up close?
Me, when I started sailing, there was no plastic on the beaches. It was something that was extremely rare. Today when I go to places like northern Spitsbergen, northern Greenland, theoretically completely pristine places, where there are no humans, absolutely everything is littered with plastic. It’s really a horror and it hurts the heart.
Not to mention of course all the microplastics that we cannot see with the naked eye, but which are at work, which enter the food chain. We all absorb about the equivalent of a credit card per week in terms of plastic, or five grams. But, of course, most of the time these are products that are extremely harmful to our health. It has become an absolutely colossal and absolutely global issue. There is not a single state that can say otherwise.