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SCIENCE science.org 25 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6583 801E
ach year, an estimated 11 million
tons of plastic waste enter the ocean,
equivalent to a cargo ship’s worth ev-
ery day. The rising tide—in the oceans
and beyond—is just a symptom of
much wider problems: unsustainable
product design, short-sighted consump-
tion, and insufficient waste management,
scientists say. To curb the flood, says Jenna
Jambeck, an environmental engineer at
the University of Georgia, “we need to take
more action and it needs to be further up-
stream” in the production process.
That’s exactly what negotiators from
193 countries are setting out to do when
they meet in Nairobi, Kenya, next week.
Their ambitious goal: to create a negoti-
ating committee that will try to hammer
out, within 2 years, a new global treaty in-
tended to curb plastic pollution.
An already released proposal, modeled
on the United Nations’s climate treaty,
would have nations adopt action plans,
set binding waste reduction targets, and
establish monitoring systems and a newglobal scientific advisory body. “It’s about
time,” says Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist
at the University of Toronto who has called
on nations to tackle the issue.
Existing international efforts to reduce
marine litter and exposure to hazardous
chemicals include some measures related
to plastic pollution. But no global treaty
tries to reduce pollution by targeting a
product’s entire life cycle, from its birth as
a raw material to its death—if it becomes
trash. Taking such a broad approach to
plastics, says Anja Brandon, a policy ana-
lyst at the Ocean Conservancy, “is going to
be a much bigger scientific endeavor.”
For one thing, rigorous, comparable
numbers on the scope and sources of the
problem are scarce, making it difficult
to identify pollution hot spots or detect
trends. Nonprofit groups and government
agencies use dozens of varying protocols
for surveying beach litter, for example.
Methods of counting microplastics in
water—shed from synthetic fabrics, for
example, or formed when large plastic ob-
jects degrade—also vary. “There are several
holes in the data,” Jambeck says.The new treaty could help by promoting
or establishing standard measuring and
accounting methods. One such approach,
called environmental economic account-
ing, is already being used in some coun-
tries to track various raw materials. And a
method known as mass balance analysis,
which tracks the amount of material en-
tering and leaving production processes,
holds promise for quantifying the amount
of recycled plastic used in new products.
Even after scientists settle on standard
metrics, collecting those numbers could
be a challenge, Jambeck notes, especially
in developing nations with relatively
weak regulatory and research infrastruc-
tures. The United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), which is hosting
the upcoming meeting, has worked to in-
crease monitoring capacity with training
programs and online courses. Such efforts
would be aided by a ne w treaty that encour-
ages funding and technological advances.
Remote sensing via satellites and drones,
for example, could more easily identify
plastic pollution trends, reducing the need
for labor-intensive ground surveys.IN DEPTH
By Erik StokstadENVIRONMENTAL POLICYUnited Nations to tackle global plastics pollution
Research could gain from negotiations to reduce, reuse, and recycle the common material
Plastic waste piles up on a beach off Panama City. Nations will try to negotiate a new treaty aimed at reducing the global problem.