World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Understanding the Scale of Plastic Pollution

By now, most people are aware that plastic pollution has become a crisis, devastating ecosystems and communities around the globe. That’s because the evidence is all around us in plain view – littering roadsides, overflowing from trash cans, and washing up on beaches. However, while we may know that plastic pollution is pervasive, it is hard to fully comprehend the monumental scale of the problem when so much more of it is out of our sight, from the plastic waste we export to developing countries to the plastic floating in remote parts of the ocean or breaking down into microplastics.

If you don’t understand the scale of a problem, how can you effectively take steps to address it? How can you know what is working and what is not? That’s where data collection comes in.

And more specifically, the need to make sure that the data we are using to understand plastic pollution are harmonized across companies, industries, and even countries – otherwise we will never fully comprehend what we are up against or what solutions are most impactful.

It was meant to be the breakthrough moment in the global fight against plastic pollution. After two years of negotiation and countless hours of work from hundreds of people around the world, the UN process to adopt a global treaty against plastic pollution would finally conclude last week. But after a roller coaster of a week, we left disappointed.

In 2019, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and American Beverage (ABA) joined forces to tackle a growing environmental crisis: plastic waste. This partnership is driven by one shared goal: to ensure that every plastic bottle remains in the loop to become another bottle, moving the world towards less plastic use and no plastic in nature. This kind of “circular economy” ensures materials are remade, reducing the need for new plastic and minimizing environmental impact. To that end, over the past five years we’ve worked to deliver meaningful, practical, and innovative solutions — and our efforts have yielded significant results.

Many of the innovations we now take for granted daily consist of single-use plastics, meaning products that can be conveniently disposed of the minute they no longer hold value to the consumer. However, the popularity and ease of the ‘take-make-waste’ economy is not without dire consequences for our planet. In the US alone, it is estimated that the annual volume of plastic waste produced is over 42 million metric tons—only 8.7% of which is recycled. At the current rate, these numbers are set to triple by 2040, since our current waste management system and recycling infrastructure cannot properly manage the volume of virgin plastic produced.

With plastic use ever growing, we need to fix the broken system that has gotten us to this point and prioritize new business models that provide the same functionality and accessibility as single-use plastics without polluting the air, water and soil that both people and wildlife depend on.

As WWF’s head of Plastic Pollution & Business, as well as a material science engineer with a decade of experience in the packaging industry, I often engage with companies about the scope and scale of the plastic pollution crisis – and specifically, what they should be doing about it. While it’s a simple question, it hasn’t always been as simple to answer.

Since its mainstream introduction in the 1940s, plastic has played an important role in shaping our society – helping our food stay fresh, our medical equipment sanitary, and our economy boom with convenient and affordable packaging for consumer products.

Recently however, the production of virgin single-use plastic has exploded, with more plastic products produced in the past 15 years alone than that of the entire 20th century. And while production has rapidly increased, our infrastructure and capacity to effectively deal with the resulting waste have not – leaving 75% of all plastic ever produced to become pollution, harming our environment, communities and even our bodies.

As an individual, I always aim to do my part with mindful consumption and proper disposal of the products I use – but as a sustainability professional, I also know that the only way to really achieve change at scale is for companies to design products and systems that make it easier for us to not create plastic waste in the first place.

Throughout my time at WWF, I've seen firsthand that businesses around the world are ready to step up. As awareness of this issue has risen, so too have corporate efforts to tackle plastic up and down the supply chain. The number of national and voluntary initiatives has increased by 60% in just the last five years. Yet even though many of the largest fast-moving consumer goods companies rank tackling plastic packaging waste as a top sustainability issue, they often don’t know where to begin to deliver the lasting and effective results our planet needs.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve the plastic pollution crisis.

There is overwhelming support around the world to reduce plastic pollution, even among major plastic-production countries. In fact, recent polling shows that 85% of people globally would be in favor of a ban on single-use plastic. Leaders in the business community see a future without plastic pollution and are actively pursuing measures to develop alternatives to petroleum-based plastic. But to sustain these efforts, we need policymakers to develop regulations that ensure a level playing field and deliver greater transparency to minimize supply chain risks.

That’s where the Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution comes in. The fourth negotiating session, or INC-4, begins April 23^rd, and is our last best chance to focus on achieving a successful treaty outcome.

We recently sat down with Erin Simon, WWF’s Vice President and Head of Plastic Waste + Business, to discuss what’s at stake with INC-4, how a global plastics treaty would impact Americans, and what we can all do to support the adoption of a strong, legally-binding agreement.

The U.S. generates more plastic waste than anywhere else in the world, affecting American rivers, coastlines, landscapes, and communities. This crisis is apparent everywhere, from our cities to the countryside. While we don’t yet know the full impact of plastic pollution on human health, research increasingly shows that there is real cause for concern.

But do Americans recognize the severity of the plastic pollution crisis? What actions will they take or support to help fix it? To find out, WWF conducted a survey of more than 1000 Americans, representative of the U.S. general population.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• The majority of Americans (85%) think that plastic waste pollution is a serious and concerning problem that requires immediate political action to solve.
• Most Americans would support legislative action that enforces corporate accountability on plastic pollution
  • A majority of people would be in favor of laws that: incentivize companies to reduce plastic waste (87%); make companies responsible for the plastic waste they create (84%); penalize companies for creating waste (78%).
• Over two-thirds of Americans support either banning (71%) or placing a fee (70%) on single-use plastics.
• When asked “would you be more likely to undertake any of the following actions if there was more assurance it was beneficial to the environment” respondents said:
  • 94% said they were “somewhat to much more likely” to recycle plastics
  • 91% said they were “somewhat to much more likely” to limit how much single-use plastic they use
  • 92% said they were “somewhat to much more likely” to choose products that are made from recycled plastics
  • 91% said they were “somewhat to much more likely” to make use of reusable and/or refillable products in place of single-use plastic items

You can explore more survey results below:

From the witness stand of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to the offices of 68 members of Congress, WWF is leading the charge on Capitol Hill for pragmatic policy solutions to reduce plastic pollution.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a first-ever hearing on March 6 to evaluate a potential solution to plastic waste long championed by WWF: Extended Producer Responsibility. Erin Simon, WWF Vice President and Head, Plastic Waste and Business, served as an expert witness to explain why this concept, also known as EPR, to shift the financial responsibility of material waste management from consumers and municipalities to plastic producers would help transition our economy away from wasteful single-use plastics.

All those bottles on beaches, fashion garments in landfills, and obsolete tech devices in dumps or incinerators, didn’t have to meet this fate. They became trash because a plan wasn’t put in place at the beginning of the product lifecycle to recapture the waste and use it to make new products and materials. That’s the basic premise of a circular economy. And it takes responding to external factors, collaborating internally, and coordinating across the entire supply chain to accomplish it well.

Having worked at WWF for over eight years leading large corporate partnerships, I saw that the most sustainable companies didn’t have the biggest sustainability teams. On the contrary, these brands effectively embedded sustainability strategy, and personnel, into each functional area: marketing, supply chain, finance, etc. This is an evolution from the often grassroots, isolated sustainability teams of years prior. The strongest companies strive to meet consumers where they are, satisfy shareholders, hold one another accountable, and meet government compliance rules.

As we think about creating a truly circular economy, the level of complexity increases as do calls for new ways to work together to drive change. Internal and external coordination must be ratcheted up. There is no room for siloed thinking; change requires a systems-thinking approach to understand the interdependencies within and outside of an organization. Additional tools are needed, especially in a rapidly changing landscape with circularity expectations from regulators, shareholders, and consumers.

Governments

One significant shift currently underway involves the ways that governments are tackling one of the major challenges in circularity: plastic waste.

Governments at the local, state, and national levels are addressing plastic waste in different ways. Perhaps most significant is the Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution, which is establishing a set of legally binding global agreements that delineate the steps and timelines necessary to change the production and consumption of plastics. Along with domestic and state legislation, initiatives like this will lead to regulatory measures. Encouraging creative thinking requires internal collaboration among stakeholders and countless others to make that shift from a voluntary to a regulatory landscape.

Companies

As Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Business change as critical as circularity requires implementing a change in corporate culture. One of the best ways to shift culture is to involve cross-functional teams in designing process change. It ensures collective understanding, clarity in accountability, and personal responsibility. In addition, making a concerted effort to align incentives across functions will encourage internal behavior change, which is especially effective when linked to corporate targets. The result is more employees taking ownership in their respective roles and encouraging the right conversations at the right levels of seniority.

Consumers

Circularity presents a new way of doing business and engaging customers. It is no secret that companies track legions of customer data before, during, and immediately after a sale. But infrequently do they continue to track that product (and its disposal). And most don’t provide guidance to the end user about how to manage or reclaim a product or its materials. Plus customers can feel abandoned when they are left to dispose or recycle the products and packaging on their own, without the help of the company who produced it or the municipality who collects it. This is a missed opportunity for circularity!

Since leaving WWF, I have been working to launch the Global Impact Collective, a new consultancy that uses systems and design thinking to advance sustainability implementation at pace.

Design thinking is an important process, which sometimes requires an expert guide and facilitator to ignite innovative ideas. The process brings together crucial stakeholders who can contribute different perspectives to the same problem. And when used well, it has become a powerful tool to drive alignment, improve collaboration, and surface truly innovative solutions.

At The Collective, we bring together key teams, including product design, sourcing, packaging, marketing, sales, finance, and others – people who don’t often find themselves in the same room at the same time, focused on problem solving. This process gives organizations the space and speed to develop many creative ideas and solutions at once. And because all the stakeholders are in the room, new solutions are socialized and pre-vetted for testing.

Consumers, governments, and companies can’t solve the plastic waste problem on their own. Coordination across sectors will be critical to understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders and making sector-wide progress. But before cross-sector collaboration happens, internal coordination within your organization is key. When you bring design thinking into the equation it invites an expansive, perspective shifting mindset. It allows you to say, “how might we…”, opening the door for broader, more creative solutions that are more inclusive and engage players throughout the value chain.

The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of WWF.