Incentivising the collection and recycling of plastics would do more to boost recycling volumes than imposing a cap on virgin plastic production, according to modelling carried out by Oxford Economics.
The research was commissioned by the trade association of the global chemical industry, the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA). It suggested that in a scenario where global plastic production was gradually cut by 5%, prices would rise across the plastics value chain and the economic cost to households could be at least five times as high as with policies that focus on waste management.
The intervention comes as negotiators to a global plastics pollution treaty prepare to meet informally at the end of September. Talks ended in deadlock last year with major plastic manufacturing countries resisting a cap on production.
Researchers modelled three waste management scenarios: in the first, a blanket landfill tax was introduced and its revenues used to subsidise recycling, generating over 32 million tonnes of recycled waste – a 64% increase in volumes, compared with almost 20 million tonnes of recycled plastics under a production cap. In the second scenario a landfill tax and subsidy was targeted at regions such as south and east Asia, which have the greatest potential to reduce the unwanted leakage of plastic waste into the environment. This increased the volume of recycled plastics by a further 4 % over the production cap. Finally, removal of current barriers to cross-border trade in recyclable waste, which have been strengthened in recent years, added nearly 1% to the volume of recycled waste .
The authors explained that they suggested the policy scenarios to the report sponsors, and these were refined to reflect potential proposals on the table at the plastics treaty negotiations. However, the researchers acknowledge that their model doesn’t take account of potential technology innovation in response to a production cap, or other ongoing impacts.
Steve Fletcher, who leads a research initiative at the University of Portsmouth to tackle plastic pollution, says that ‘the results are surprising at first, but then when you look at what’s included and what’s not included, they’re not surprising at all’.
‘The narrow framing artificially gives the impression that downstream solutions are more effective than upstream, but many of the benefits of upstream interventions are not even included in the analysis, like the reduction of climate impacts, biodiversity impacts [and] human health impacts. Once you add all those things in, the picture might look substantially different.’
He adds that ‘plastic harms are generated across the entire life cycle’ including during production use, reuse, recycling and disposal, which is why bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have called for wide-ranging and coordinated policy interventions.
Report author Alice Gambarin says health impacts were not in the study’s scope. However, she say that in each scenario the volume of plastic waste polluting the environment was held constant, ‘so we feel that not capturing all those spillover health costs and other associated costs is not missing a part of the story when it comes to comparing scenarios’.
She observes that while other studies have explored a combination of policies ‘it’s quite hard to tell what is working and what just has a marginal effect … what we’re trying to do here is create a stylised version of these scenarios [to] help negotiators to isolate the effects of the various types of interventions’. She adds: ‘I think it helps [to] consider the unintended consequences of policies.’
