Governments’ failure to agree a treaty on curbing plastics pollution draws attention to how reliant on the material we have become but there may be a silver lining, writes Smith Mordak.

Devastating news this month that we did not get the plastics treaty we deserved. After 10 days of negotiations in Geneva, countries were unable to agree to limit plastic production.

Core to the talks breaking down was a disagreement between around 100 countries (including the UK and EU bloc) that wanted to see curbs to production included in the treaty, and the “like-minded group” including China, Kuwait, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia (and reportedly supported by the US) which said production caps crossed a red line and instead want the treaty to focus only on reducing plastic waste.

That we came as close as we did is fascinating and cause for enormous hope

This is excruciatingly disappointing, but not surprising. Plastics are in almost everything. Even trying to cut out single-use plastics is almost impossible, let alone all plastics. To curb plastic production would be to curb production of stuff, and to curb production of stuff would be to curb economic growth, which, under our current economic system, means a recession.

Our growth-reliant economy is like a bike; it only stays upright if it keeps moving forward. We’re not ready to stick an umbrella in its spokes. But that we came as close as we did is fascinating and cause for enormous hope.

Some might argue that if only we embraced the principles of the circular economy, and the potential of waste recovery and remanufacturing, combined with bio-plastic alternatives and efficiency efforts, everything would be fine. It’s true that products that reuse discarded plastic and divert them from waste streams and oceans and our very cells are important and laudable. Yes, bio-plastics and other plastic alternatives are key to weaning ourselves off our plastic addiction.

And, yes clever designs that use less material, plastic or otherwise, are to be encouraged and celebrated. But for years, designers have been saying that recycling is not enough.

The key reason that recycling – or a circular economy more broadly – isn’t going to solve all our problems, is that to maintain the health of our current economic order we need to keep finding new sources of material growth: new quarries to mine, new places to extract from, new ways of making more stuff to keep growing the economy.

When the economy stops growing we call that a recession and everyone panics, understandably. If the economy isn’t getting bigger, we find ourselves in a zero-sum game where debts are repaid through deeper extraction and exploitation of the least powerful in society. This looks like austerity, modern slavery and worse.

Green growth requires an absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental harms

This is why many argue for green growth, a neat trick that allows economic growth to continue but without the nasty side effects of environmental destruction, pollution (of carbon into the atmosphere or plastics into the oceans) or ever-intensifying hard-labour regimes. Green growth would mean we wouldn’t have to unpick our debt dependency, so if it could work, it would be a practical solution.

The problem is, it can’t work, or at least, even if it did, the remedy would be worse than the disease. Green growth requires an absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental harms, in other words: more money, less material.

If you produce jeans, then under green growth, you’d need to produce more jeans that you could sell at higher prices every year, while using less material every year. You might manage that for a couple of years, but eventually people aren’t going to want to buy denim chaps, or hot pants, or the thread outline of the idea of a pair of jeans for thousands of pounds.

This obviously doesn’t work, so the alternative might be to keep using more material, but reduce the environmental impacts of the material to zero, or at least to net zero. That’s all the environmental impacts – not just the carbon emissions or the fugitive microplastics, but also the habitat loss, the acidification of oceans, the heating of water systems used for cooling – everything, all while using more and more of these alternative materials every year.

Again, you might manage this for a while, maybe making bamboo jeans with bioplastic and recycled metal zips and buttons. But at some point, you wouldn’t be able to genetically modify bamboo to grow any faster, or build robot bees that will pollinate at near light speed, or devise heat pumps made of basically nothing to cool your metal recycling facilities.

The world’s richest people know this isn’t possible. That’s why they’re making plans to mine the asteroids and colonise space.

Maybe we are collectively ready to start putting in place the mechanisms that would allow us to get off this nightmare bicycle

So we find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. We need plastic to keep our economic order going, and all that plastic is killing us.

Same goes for fossil fuels, and like the plastics treaties, COP decision texts have failed to get us past soft language like “phase down” or “transition away” to actually placing hard limits on fossil-fuel use.

The difference with this plastics treaty is that we don’t have a weak text agreed that made everyone feel a bit better that at least we’ve made some progress. Drafts that would have done so were literally ripped up by the negotiators.

This forces us to face the fact that we’re at an impasse. So what do we do next?

That 100 counties are now on record as willing to countenance production caps of a material so ubiquitous as plastic is fantastic. We’re not collectively ready to sign on, but maybe we are collectively ready to start putting in place the mechanisms that would allow us to get off this nightmare bicycle.

It’s true that signing on to an agreement to limit production without any plan as to how to live outside of our existing economic order is very dangerous. But happily other economies are available.

If we get our heads – and our post-growth research – together then next time we’re negotiating a cap in production of something – be it fossil-fuel use, or plastics, or concrete (which, as the most-used material after water, is definitely on the cards for such a negotiation at some point) – we won’t be choosing between death by ecosystem collapse or death by metaphorical peloton pile up, we’ll actually have the option to choose life.

Smith Mordak is an architect, writer and curator. They were previously chief executive of the UK Green Building Council and director of sustainability and physics at British engineering firm Buro Happold.

The photo is by Naja Bertolt Jensen via Unsplash.

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