We Can’t Keep Dodging The Plastic Pollution Crisis
- Gregory Andrews
- Aug 16
- 3 min read
This was the local drain-channel where I lived in Accra, Ghana!
News out of Geneva last week was grim. After years of talking and mounting scientific warnings, negotiations on the much-anticipated global plastics treaty talks collapsed. Countries couldn’t agree, especially on the one measure that would actually work: capping production. The US and its petrochemical allies like Saudi Arabia and Russia, argued for a “focus only on recycling”. It’s a well-worn tactic, and a dangerous one, because recycling is the fig leaf the plastics industry is hiding behind while production soars. And soar it does: the world now churns out over 400 million tonnes of plastic a year, and that number is set to triple by 2060. Less than 10% is ever recycled.
But this isn’t just a story about numbers, tonnes, and percentages. It’s a story about lives. I’ve seen, with my own eyes, what it looks like. When I was in Ghana as Australia’s High Commissioner, the local drain channels in Accra weren’t just brown with silt - they were thick with plastic bags, bottles, and packaging. In the dry season the stagnated water bred deadly malaria mosquitos. And in the wet season, even worse happened. The drains blocked, the water rose, the channels overflowed and people drowned.
Plastic doesn’t break down in human timeframes. It fragments. It weathers. It enters the soil, the water, the air, our bodies. Microplastics are already in human placentas, our blood, testes, ovaries and even our brains. They’re linked to cancers, hormone disruption, developmental disorders, and chronic illnesses. The World Bank and UNEP estimate that the human health toll of plastic pollution already costs US$1.5 trillion a year. And that’s before we count the silent toll on marine life - whales starving with bellies full of plastic bags, seabirds feeding bottle caps to their chicks, turtles strangled by drifting nets.
The Geneva failure isn’t just a diplomatic misstep; it’s another delay in the face of an accelerating public health emergency. And the longer we wait, the harder it gets. Every year of inaction means more virgin plastic in the economy, more clogged drains in Accra and Jakarta, more communities forced to live with flooding, disease, and loss.
We’ve been sold the idea that we can recycle our way out of this. We can’t. The mathematics simply doesn’t add up. A plastic bottle can be recycled once, maybe twice, before its quality degrades and it’s downcycled into something that can’t be recycled again. And all the while, new plastic - cheaper to make from oil and gas than from old bottles - pours into the market.
This is a big deal. It’s a big deal for the children in Ghana who have to deal with plastic-blocked drains. It’s a big deal for families in the Pacific whose fishing grounds are turning into plastic graveyards. It’s a big deal for every one of us who breathes air laced with microplastic dust. And it’s a big deal because we are at a tipping point in history when perhaps we still have a choice - to stop the flood at the source, or live with the consequences forever.
The Geneva talks will resume eventually. When they do, the world will need to show more courage than it did last week. Because the truth is, plastic pollution is not waiting politely for us to get our act together. It’s already in our rivers, our food, our bloodstreams. The time to treat it like the global crisis it is was yesterday. The second-best time is today.
What are the next steps to move on? Could the high ambitions coalition of countries set up an international agreement within their jurisdictions to strongly reduce consumption of virgin plastic to get the ball rolling?
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The Ocean Cleanup organization is targeting river systems in various countries in the world as well as the great pacific garbage patch. The amount of plastic pollution they block from entering the ocean is staggering. As much as possible is recycled but the rest goes to landfill. Even here in Australia the collection and reuse of plastic waste has been a disaster and we cannot expect better from developing countries if we can't solve this problem. I also recently saw families in Gaza boiling water over a fire being fed with plastic bottles. I hate to think what that's doing to their already fragile health.