The 160-Year History of Plastic

01The fact that it doesn't rot was originally a point of pride

Plastic is not the name of a single substance. It is an umbrella term for a whole family of materials with similar properties. They share just one thing in common: exceptionally long molecules.

Ordinary molecules like sugar or water are made of anywhere from a few to several dozen atoms. But the molecules that make up plastics are linked like chains, with the same units repeating thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times. We call these molecules polymers. Length itself creates their properties. When chains are long, they tangle and slide past each other, stretching without snapping when pulled. That is why a thin plastic bag can hold a heavy load.

Yet this was not a structure newly invented by humans. The cellulose in wood, proteins in our bodies, and natural rubber are all polymers. Plastic is not a material that never existed in nature, but a structure nature already used, designed and built by humans.

What links these chains together is the covalent bond. Because atoms share electrons to bind tightly together, ordinary heat or water will not break them apart. On top of that, microorganisms that feed on these chains are rare. On Earth's timeline, this kind of food did not exist until very recently. That is why plastic rarely rots.

Here is something worth remembering. This quality was originally its selling point. An item that does not spoil when wet, cannot be eaten by bugs, and stays intact after years of use. Ivory combs crack and wooden handles rot, but plastic did not. The exact property that troubles us today is the very property that made this material sell back then.

Let's keep one more thing in mind. Plastics are broadly divided into two types. Thermoplastics soften when heated and harden again when cooled. That is because the chains are merely tangled, not chemically bonded to each other. PET bottles, plastic bags, and yogurt containers belong here. Thermosets, once hardened, form a net-like chemical bond between their chains, so applying heat again simply burns them rather than melting them. Melamine dishware and tires are like this. Only thermoplastics can be melted down and remade.

Here is the first answer to the question, 'Why are some plastics recyclable while others are not?' The rest of the answer lies not in chemistry, but in cost and systems, which we will look at much later. First, let's explore why this material was created in the first place.

Worth remembering The fact that this material's appeal and its trouble stem from the exact same property—every debate that follows starts right here.

02A $10,000 Billiard Ball and Elephants: How Much of It Is True?

In 1846, Christian Friedrich Schönbein, a chemist in Basel, Switzerland, treated cotton with nitric and sulfuric acids to obtain nitrocellulose. At first, it drew attention as an explosive called "guncotton." But collodion—a solution made by dissolving this substance in ether and alcohol—began to be used as a liquid bandage to cover wounds starting in the late 1840s. A substance born as an explosive had become a medical coating.

The person who tried to solidify this into objects was Alexander Parkes, a metallurgist in Birmingham, England. Between 1855 and 1865, he obtained several patents for hardening nitrocellulose by mixing it with vegetable oil, camphor, and other ingredients, naming it "Parkesine" after himself. At the 1862 London International Exhibition, he showcased knife handles, combs, and medallions made of Parkesine, earning a bronze medal. Today, this is regarded as the very first moment artificial plastic stepped before the public. However, Parkes was a failure as a businessman. He founded a company in 1866, but in an attempt to cut costs too aggressively, he used substandard raw materials; as the products cracked and warped, the venture collapsed around 1868. The first plastic company was also the first plastic failure.

Now we cross the Atlantic. In 1863, John Wesley Hyatt, a printer in Albany, New York, is said to have seen an advertisement in the newspaper. The billiard ball maker Phelan & Collender had reportedly offered a $10,000 reward to find a substitute for ivory. After all, a single elephant tusk yielded only three or four usable balls.

This story still appears in nearly every article and documentary about plastic. Yet no one has ever found the original newspaper advertisement. While the Science History Institute notes that a New York firm offered $10,000, it adds that "Hyatt somehow never tried to claim the reward," and the English Wikipedia article flatly states that there is no evidence the prize was ever paid. Rather than a verified fact, it is a legend long circulated in the industry.

What is certain is the outcome. In 1870, Hyatt and his brother Isaiah obtained a U.S. patent titled "Improvement in Treating and Molding Pyroxyline." The breakthrough was the discovery that camphor dissolves nitrocellulose under heat and pressure. This material was celluloid, a trademark coined by his brother. Hyatt was a printer with no formal education in chemistry.

Origin stories are usually polished until they look neat. A bounty was offered, an unknown printer took up the challenge, and he won the prize—this narrative fits together so neatly that no one questions it.

In 1872, the Celluloid Manufacturing Company moved from Albany to Newark, New Jersey, and entered full-scale mass production. The list of items made from this material is fascinating: combs, knife handles, shirt collars and cuffs, piano keys, and eyeglass frames. Among these, combs, knife handles, and eyeglass frames were items previously crafted from ivory, tortoiseshell, or mother-of-pearl. It was the first material to cheaply imitate substances once taken from animals.

Celluloid advertisements actually promoted the cause of saving elephants. Even today, this remains the most frequently quoted passage when explaining the origins of plastic.

Yet the ivory trade continued to thrive long after. Around 1900, Belgian Congo alone exported roughly 350 tons of ivory per year, accounting for about half of all African ivory exports. Why didn't demand fall when a substitute arrived? Because the value of a luxury good comes from its rarity. As celluloid combs became common, ivory combs became all the more special. The substitute didn't eliminate the original market; it created a new market right beside it.

The story with billiard balls is even more nuanced. Billiard balls of that era were likely not carved from solid blocks of celluloid, but were made of shellac and wood pulp coated with a thin film of celluloid. A genuine replacement for ivory billiard balls did not arrive until Bakelite emerged in the early 20th century. The very item that sparked the legend of saving elephants was, ironically, replaced last of all.

What celluloid truly revolutionized lay elsewhere. In 1888 and 1889, George Eastman and chemist Henry Reichenbach introduced celluloid roll film and the Kodak camera. Replacing heavy, fragile glass plates with a rollable strip liberated photography from being solely a craft for specialists, and cinema soon blossomed on top of it. Twentieth-century visual culture was literally built upon this material.

There was a price to pay as well. Nitrocellulose is extremely flammable. It became a frequent cause of fires in theater projection booths, and it was not until 1950 that Kodak stopped producing nitrate film.

Worth remembering We must check the original records behind popular origin stories, and substitutes did not extinguish original demand—two misalignments that will reappear later in our story.

03Chains by Design, and Chains Born of Accidents

Celluloid and Parkesine shared a common limitation. Both were chemically modified versions of cellulose, a natural polymer obtained from wood or cotton. Because they merely borrowed long chains already crafted by nature, humans could not tailor their properties at will. That is why both are classified as semi-synthetic plastics.

The person who crossed that line was the Belgian-born American chemist Leo Baekeland. In 1907, he reacted phenol and formaldehyde under heat and pressure to create a resin that hardened. It was Bakelite, the first plastic whose chains were created entirely by humans starting from small molecules. An anecdote claims his patent beat that of British engineer James Swinburne, who was developing a similar substance, by just one single day. While multiple secondary sources repeat this, this text could not directly cross-check the original filing dates.

In February 1909, he unveiled this material at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting. Because it was a thermoset—meaning once hardened, it would never melt again—it held up remarkably well to heat and electricity. Promoted with the phrase "the material of a thousand uses," it quickly found its way into telephone bodies, radio casings, switchboards, and electrical insulators. The age of electricity could only truly dawn with good insulators. The reason the "first plastic" is cited as 1862 in some sources and 1907 in others is that they use different criteria: semi-synthetic versus fully synthetic.

Yet no one actually knew what these chains really were. In the early 1920s, German chemist Hermann Staudinger argued that substances like rubber and cellulose were not loose clumps of small molecules, but single giant macromolecules of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of atoms joined by covalent bonds. Mainstream chemistry fiercely resisted the idea. Colleagues asked him why he bothered clinging to such "sticky chemistry."

Only in 1953, 33 years later, did he receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. Designing the length of molecules to engineer desired properties is possible only on this concept.

Yet while the theory was finding its footing, most new plastics were actually emerging from accidents.

In 1926, Waldo Semon at BF Goodrich in the United States failed in his quest to find an adhesive that could bond rubber to metal. Instead, by heating polyvinyl chloride with a solvent, he turned it into a soft, elastic material. PVC itself had been known since the 19th century, but it was too stiff and brittle to be useful; the breakthrough idea of adding a plasticizer turned it into an industrial material. Around the same time, Germany's BASF began commercial production of polystyrene, though the specific year recorded for that milestone varies across sources.

In March 1933, Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson at Britain's ICI were experimenting with ethylene under ultra-high pressure when they discovered a white, waxy solid inside their reaction vessel. It was polyethylene. Because it was a pure accident caused by a trace leak of oxygen acting as an initiator, the result could not even be reproduced at first. In April 1938, Roy Plunkett, a young chemist at DuPont, opened the valve on a cylinder of refrigerant gas, but nothing came out. When he sawed the cylinder open, he found a slippery white powder inside. It was Teflon, which had polymerized on its own with the iron lining of the cylinder acting as a catalyst. Several of the most widely used plastics today are products of accident, not planning.

Other materials were forged by deliberate design. In February 1935, a team led by Wallace Carothers at DuPont synthesized Nylon 6,6. Realizing that the water generated during condensation reactions prevented chains from growing longer, they removed that water through distillation to achieve long molecules. It was the first time Staudinger's theory was put to proper industrial use. After a long struggle with depression, Carothers took his own life in April 1937. He never lived to see how the material he created transformed the world.

In October 1938, DuPont introduced nylon before an audience of 3,000 women's club members in New York. It was billed as a fiber made from "coal, air, and water." On its first day of public sale, May 15, 1940, roughly 800,000 pairs of stockings were sold.

Then came the war. On September 1, 1939, ICI began operating its first polyethylene plant with a 100-ton annual capacity; on that very same day, Germany invaded Poland. Because polyethylene lost almost no signal at ultra-high frequencies, it instantly became a military secret and was funneled into radar cable insulation, prompting Britain to halt commercial sales. Nylon vanished from stocking shelves to become parachutes and ropes, while acrylic was turned into aircraft windshields. A figure stating that US plastics production grew by about 300% from 1941 to 1945 is repeated across numerous sources, but because it is unclear what baseline the original statistics counted, it is best taken simply as an impression of scale.

The war ended. What remained was massive production capacity with nowhere to go.

Worth remembering What this era left behind was not just a list of new materials, but surplus factories—and the ingredients for the next chapter were made right here.

04Disposability didn't start with an invention—it started with collapsing prices

Once the war ended, those factories pivoted toward consumer goods. Yet what truly ushered in the disposable era was neither a brand-new material nor surplus production capacity alone. It was the price.

In 1953, Karl Ziegler at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Coal Research combined titanium tetrachloride and aluminum compounds to discover a catalyst that polymerized ethylene at room temperature and low pressure. Until then, polyethylene could only be produced in facilities capable of withstanding thousands of atmospheres of pressure. Thanks to this catalyst, much sturdier high-density polyethylene could be manufactured cheaply. The following year, Giulio Natta at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy used the same principle to produce polypropylene with regularly aligned side chains. The two shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Then petrochemicals entered the picture. Ethylene and propylene, the raw materials for plastics, are mostly obtained by cracking naphtha—a byproduct of refining crude oil—at high temperatures. The crucial point is that these feedstocks were not deliberately extracted just to make plastic; they emerged as a byproduct stream from refining fuels. Consequently, the more petroleum the world consumed, the cheaper raw plastic materials became. It wasn't new inventions that made disposable items feel effortless to throw away; it was their collapsing price.

Next, the habit itself was sold. The August 1, 1955 issue of America's LIFE magazine ran an article titled 'Throwaway Living.' It featured a photograph of a family standing with open arms, looking up at disposable plates, diapers, pans, and dog dishes soaring through the air. The article began by noting that washing these items would take 40 hours, but no housewife would bother. Throwing things away was introduced not as laziness, but as liberation from household drudgery. Even a 79-cent disposable barbecue grill made an appearance.

The products that emerged during this era had vastly different original intentions. A prime example is the bag created by Sten Gustaf Thulin, an engineer at the Swedish packaging company Celloplast. By folding and welding a flat tube of plastic film, he integrated the handles directly into the body—creating what we now know as the T-shirt plastic bag. The company filed for a patent in 1962 and had it granted in 1965. Yet his son, Raoul, later shared in an interview that his father designed the bag to save forests from being cleared for paper bags, intending for it to be durable and reused many times. His father always kept a folded bag in his pocket and would have found the idea of tossing it after a single use bizarre. An inventor's intention doesn't dictate how society will ultimately use their creation.

The final piece of the puzzle was the bottle. Nathaniel Wyeth, a mechanical engineer at DuPont, was searching for a way to package carbonated drinks in plastic bottles. Early experiments with detergent bottles failed as they swelled and burst under pressure. Only when he stretched and aligned the molecules in two directions could the plastic finally withstand the force. That patent, filed in 1970 and granted in 1973, gave us the PET bottle we know today.

Worth remembering The answer to 'why we throw away so much': the material became cheap first, and the habit of tossing it was sold next.

05Who Funded the Anti-Litter Campaign?

As single-use items became widespread, pushback quickly followed. In 1953, the US state of Vermont passed a law banning the sale of beer and ale in non-refillable bottles. The following year, the state supreme court upheld the law.

Around the same time, something else was taking shape in New York. Makers of disposable containers such as the American Can Company, Owens-Illinois Glass, and Dixie Cup—joined later by Coca-Cola—funded the creation of a nonprofit called 'Keep America Beautiful.' Sources differ on whether it was founded in 1953 or officially launched the following year. The organization waged a massive campaign urging people not to litter, while simultaneously mounting organized opposition against container deposit laws. A deposit system refunds money when bottles are returned, putting the burden of collection back on the manufacturers.

The campaign reached its peak in 1971. In the 'Crying Indian' PSA timed for Earth Day, a Native American paddling a canoe through a polluted river sheds a tear at the sight of roadside trash. Then the line appears: people start pollution, and people can stop it. It became one of the most famous public service announcements in American advertising history. Only much later was it revealed that the actor was Italian-American, not Native American, and in 2023, the ad's rights were transferred to a Native American organization.

Inside the industry around that time, a very different conversation was taking place. An internal report delivered to US plastics executives in April 1973 described plastic recycling as costly and difficult. It noted that sorting was 'infeasible' and that there was virtually nothing to recover from old products. In 2020, NPR and PBS Frontline tracked down and reported on this document, and Larry Thomas, who led an industry lobbying group for more than 10 years, testified about an intentional strategy: when people believe recycling works, they worry that much less about the environment.

Then in 1988, the Society of the Plastics Industry introduced the Resin Identification Code. That's the symbol with numbers 1 through 7 inside a triangle. Its original purpose was simply to help sorting facilities identify resin types. Yet because the shape around the numbers looked almost identical to the recycling symbol, people came to see every piece of plastic stamped with it as recyclable. A 2013 revised standard dropped the chasing arrows in favor of a solid triangle, but the old symbol is still everywhere.

Up to this point, these are facts backed by records and testimony. Beyond this, the claim that the industry deliberately manufactured a framework of individual responsibility is an interpretation by critics. Keeping these two separate in how we tell it turns what could sound like a conspiracy theory into history.

One more thing. Boiling this down to 'recycling was a complete lie from the start' is also an exaggeration. Recycling for aluminum, glass, and paper actually works. Even within plastics, PET and HDPE are recovered relatively well. The real problem is that the single umbrella word 'recycling' ends up glossing over completely different realities beneath it.

Worth remembering Where the burden of responsibility shifted—the very heart of this story, where fact and interpretation must be read apart.

06Why the Same Country Has Three Recycling Rates in the Same Year

Beneath the single term 'recycling rate,' three entirely different things are tangled together. Material recycling turns plastic back into raw plastic feedstock. Energy recovery burns plastic to use the generated heat for electricity or heating, meaning the material itself disappears. Downcycling turns it back into material, but the quality degrades—a PET bottle becomes synthetic fiber or stuffing, and after that, it has nowhere left to go.

South Korea is the clearest example of this confusion. As of 2021, the recycling rate tallied by the Ministry of Environment was 73%. This figure includes energy recovery from incineration. If you convert that same year using EU-style material recycling standards, it drops to about 27%. If you isolate municipal solid waste, which contains many single-use items, the material recycling rate hovers at 16.4%. The same country, the same year, three numbers. Citations claiming that 'South Korea ranks second in the world in recycling' usually borrow that first number.

Global figures face a similar situation. The most frequently cited figure of 9% comes from a 2017 Science Advances paper, and it is a cumulative rate calculated across all waste accumulated from 1950 to 2015. It is not a recycling rate for a specific single year. Furthermore, it measures the amount fed into recycling processes, not the amount that actually became recycled raw material. The 8.7% figure for 2018 released by the US Environmental Protection Agency is also calculated by dividing recovered volume by generated volume, so it does not deduct the share exported after collection or screened out during sorting.

What that 'export' truly amounted to came to light in 2018. Early that year, China implemented its 'National Sword' policy, banning imports of 24 types of waste, including plastic waste, and tightening contamination thresholds tenfold, from 0.5% to 0.05%. When the world's largest importer of plastic waste shut its doors, China's plastic waste imports dropped by 99%. Waste with nowhere to go surged into Malaysia, Vietnam, and Turkey until those countries closed their doors one by one as well. That was when we finally saw where the plastic we had washed and dried was actually heading.

Let's also look at two alternatives that are frequently mentioned. One is chemical recycling. The idea is to break plastic down with heat to return it to raw materials. However, raising the temperature produces more gas, lowering oil yields, and the wide variety of products makes separation costs high. Because it is difficult to obtain monomers pure enough to recreate the original products, the loop does not close. There is also criticism that it cannot truly be called recycling since most of the output is fuel. Reports indicate that three pyrolysis facilities in the United States shipped out more than 2 million pounds of hazardous waste between 2021 and 2024.

The other is biodegradability. Biodegradability certification is determined by tests in industrial composting facilities maintained at around 58 degrees Celsius. In backyard compost bins, underground, or in the ocean, it often remains virtually unchanged even after several years. In areas lacking such facilities, if it gets mixed into ordinary recycling, it actually degrades the quality of recycled raw materials. Biodegradability is not an inherent property of a material, but a label that applies only to a combination of material and processing infrastructure.

The OECD presented another 9% of a different nature. Its calculation showed that out of the plastic waste generated in the single year of 2019, the share successfully recycled was 9%. Global plastic use that same year stood at 460 million tons, and without major policy changes, this rate is projected to remain at just 17% even in 2060.

Worth remembering A chapter that prompts you to ask what was counted and how whenever you come across a recycling rate figure.

07Where Removing Plastic Makes Things Worse

Reading the story up to this point, it is easy to lean toward a single conclusion. But unless we account for what problems this material actually solved, we cannot accurately target what needs to be reduced.

In 1950, Carl Walter and W. P. Murphy Jr. introduced the plastic blood collection bag. Until then, blood was stored in glass bottles. Glass bottles broke easily, were vulnerable to contamination, and carried the risk of air entering veins during transfusions. Plastic bags reduced all these problems at once, and even made it possible to separate drawn blood into red blood cells, plasma, and platelets for separate storage. Today's blood transfusion system stands on these bags.

In 1956, New Zealand pharmacist and veterinarian Colin Murdoch filed a patent for a disposable plastic syringe. While there are differing claims about whether he was the sole inventor, it is clear that this device made a massive contribution to breaking the chain of infection caused by sterilized, reused glass syringes. Single-use plastic from hospitals is not waste; it is an infection control device.

The same goes for cars. According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, cutting a vehicle’s weight by 10% improves fuel economy by 6~8%. Plastics account for more than half the volume of an average car, but less than 10% of its weight. If you were to replace those parts with metal, the vehicle would become that much heavier and burn more fuel.

When it comes to food, the conclusion is mixed. A plastic-wrapped cucumber extends its shelf life from 3 days to 13~17 days compared to an unwrapped one. A Swiss study found that from farm to retail, packaging reduces loss so significantly that it is a net positive even when factoring in the climate impact. On the other hand, the UK’s WRAP found that at the household stage, packaging did not reduce food waste and could even increase it. The answer varies by item and by stage of the supply chain.

The debate over grocery bags is frequently turned on its head as well. That is where the figure from a 2018 Life Cycle Assessment by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency comes from: "A cotton bag must be used 7,100 times to beat a plastic bag." However, that value came from just one of fifteen environmental indicators: ozone depletion. Leaving out that single indicator drops the figure to 50 to 1,400 times, and looking solely at climate change, it is 52 times. The baseline of comparison was also tailored to Danish conditions—a plastic bag reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. Furthermore, this assessment did not include indicators for marine litter and microplastics at all. Therefore, flipping the argument to claim that plastic bags are better based on this number simply does not hold up.

A Life Cycle Assessment is not a tool that declares which side is right. It is a tool that asks which option is better under which indicators, and when compared to what.

Worth remembering To accurately target the problem, we must first account for what this material actually solved—a scale for reading the final two chapters.

08The Real Scale of Ocean Plastic, and What Was Found Inside the Body

When most people hear the name Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they imagine an actual island of trash you could walk across. Expressions comparing it to several times the size of a country have only cemented that impression.

In 2018, Laurent Lebreton and his team sailed into that area to measure it firsthand. Floating across an area of about 1.6 million km² between Hawaii and California was at least 79,000 tons of plastic. It is indeed about 16 times the land area of South Korea. Yet in terms of density, it averages just over 50 kg per km². It is closer to a scattered mist than an island. Even if you sail right through it, most of it simply looks like open ocean.

Its composition is even more surprising. While there were 1.8 trillion pieces, more than 46% of the mass consisted of fishing gear, primarily abandoned fishing nets—not straws or plastic bags. Microplastics accounted for 94% of the total piece count, but made up only 8% of the mass. You get a completely different picture depending on whether you count pieces or weigh them.

Estimates of how much plastic enters the ocean also vary widely. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck and her colleagues calculated that out of 275 million tons of plastic waste generated by 192 coastal countries in 2010 alone, between 4.8 million and 12.7 million tons entered the ocean. The frequently cited figure of "8 million tons per year" is the midpoint of this range. In 2021, Lourens Meijer and his team calculated river inputs separately, arriving at 800,000 to 2.7 million tons per year, and concluded that more than 1,000 rivers account for 80% of the total. While the two papers examined different scopes and cannot be directly compared, they both highlight the fact that these numbers are model estimates rather than physical measurements.

The most widely cited claim shares a similar story. At Davos in 2016, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum announced that there would be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. This comparison was made by weight and calculated by projecting Jambeck's estimate out to 2050—an extrapolation that Jambeck herself did not agree with. The fish biomass figure relied on a 2008 estimate that its original authors noted was highly uncertain. Most critically, the projected ranges themselves—850 million to 950 million tons of plastic versus 812 million to 899 million tons of fish—actually overlap.

When it comes to the human body, there is one more reason to be cautious. A study published in Nature Medicine in February 2025 reported that micro- and nanoplastic concentrations found in brain tissues from autopsies conducted in 2024 averaged about 4,800 micrograms per gram, or 0.48% by weight, which was about 50% higher than in samples from 2016. The media quickly reframed this as finding a whole spoon of plastic inside the brain.

Here, detection and toxicity operate on entirely different levels. This study reported what was there and how much, not what illnesses it causes or to what extent. While there was an observation that higher concentrations were detected in the brains of people diagnosed with dementia, dementia may simply impair the brain's waste clearance mechanisms, making the direction of causality uncertain. Methodological critiques also emerged, noting the small sample size and pointing out that the analytical technique used could mistake lipids for plastics. The growing accumulation of reports that plastic enters the human body and proving what it actually does there remain two very different stages.

Worth remembering The real scale and actual composition behind the headlines—this is where the choice of what to target really diverges.

09There Is Still No Treaty

In early 2022, the resumed fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, adopted Resolution 5/14, 'End plastic pollution.' It was a mandate to create a legally binding international treaty by the end of 2024, covering the entire life cycle from production to disposal. To this end, an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee was formed.

That deadline was not met. The fifth session, held in Busan in late 2024, was meant to finalize the treaty text, but it ended in an adjournment. In August 2025, when the session resumed in Geneva, Switzerland, around 2,600 people gathered, including delegations from 183 countries, but no agreement was reached there either. The meeting concluded when ambitious nations rejected a weak draft, and not even a schedule for the next session was set at that gathering. Since then, up to the time of this writing, no treaty has been established.

The point of contention is surprisingly simple: Will the treaty address production volume itself, or will it only cover what happens after use?

The logic of those who argue for reducing production goes like this: no matter how well emissions and waste are managed, if the volume produced continues to grow, management capacity simply cannot keep up. According to Plastics Europe, global plastic production in 2023 was 413.8 million tons, and 90.4% of it was fossil-fuel-based. Looking at usage figures from the OECD, which uses a different calculation method, without major policy changes, 460 million tons in 2019 will climb to 1,231 million tons by 2060.

The argument for addressing only waste management was also clearly laid out at the conference. Oil-producing countries and nations with petrochemical industries viewed a production cap as essentially surrendering their domestic industrial policy to an international treaty. And as we saw in the previous chapter, switching from plastic back to alternative materials is not always beneficial. Their argument is that building up waste management infrastructure first in the countries that lack it is a faster path toward real environmental improvement.

Even without a treaty, regional regulations have already produced various results. In January 2002, Bangladesh became the first country in the world to ban the production and use of thin plastic bags with a thickness of 20 micrometers or less. A primary reason was that they clogged drains and exacerbated floods. While the law remains in effect today, local reports consistently note that lax enforcement has limited its effectiveness. That same year, Ireland introduced a 15-cent levy per bag, and per capita consumption plummeted from 328 bags to 21 bags per year. Banning something and eliminating it are two different things. Through its 2019 Single-Use Plastics Directive, the EU banned cotton bud sticks, cutlery, and straws starting in July 2021, mandated tethered caps on plastic bottles starting in July 2024, and set a target of 90% separate collection for plastic bottles by 2029.

So what should we be watching for going forward? There are four things: when the next session will be scheduled, and whether the decision-making rules remain based on consensus or switch to voting; whether provisions on production cuts survive in the draft; whether regulations that set specific numerical targets, like those in the EU and Ireland, actually hit those numbers; and whether what countries count as their recycling rate becomes standardized.

A material that began in front of a billiard ball now stands before the doors of the conference hall. The doors have not opened yet.

Worth remembering This is not a prediction, but a viewing guide: you only need to watch four things—the session schedule and decision rules, the production clause, the effectiveness of regulations, and the definition of the numbers.