Global Plastic Pollution Is a ‘Deadly Ticking Clock’: Report
Connecting the Dots states that "environmental crises typically compete for public and policy attention, with each crisis having its own band of proponents who insist their crisis is the one most in need of awareness, interest, and financial support.""The reality, however, could not be further from the truth—environmental crises such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution do not exist in isolation," the report stresses. "The root causes are, in fact, the same—the overconsumption of finite resources."
April 1, 2023 | Source: Common Dreams | by Kenny Stancil
“The damage done by rampant overproduction of virgin plastics and their lifecycle is irreversible—this is a threat to human civilization and the planet’s basic ability to maintain a habitable environment.”
“There is a deadly ticking clock counting swiftly down.”
So says Tom Gammage, an ocean campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a United Kingdom-based group whose new report warns that only a muscular global treaty can turn the tide against the life-threatening crisis of plastic pollution.
Published on Tuesday, Connecting the Dots: Plastic Pollution and the Planetary Emergency assembles the latest scientific data to show how the unprecedented accumulation of toxic plastic particles “directly undermines our health, drives biodiversity loss, exacerbates climate change, and risks generating large-scale harmful environmental changes.”
Released in the wake of a landmark United Nations study that documented how plastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems has skyrocketed in recent years and is projected to more than double this decade and nearly triple by 2040 if governments fail to prevent fossil fuel and petrochemical companies from expanding the production of single-use plastics, EIA’s report seeks to inform discussions at next month’s U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, where member states will have a chance to commit to drastically reducing waste.