The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and World Wildlife Fund have initiated a joint campaign calling for a legally binding UN treaty on plastic pollution.
Successful solo long-distance sailor MacArthur, who formed her foundation after retiring from professional sailing in 2010, has said that voluntary agreements and existing measures cannot solve the plastic problem alone.
“Many companies have taken important voluntary steps, laying the foundations for wide-reaching cooperation, but they cannot reach the scale we need to urgently solve this crisis,” her foundation says.
“Plastic pollution doesn’t stop at or care about borders, so countries and organisations can’t fix the problem on their own. It is a global challenge that needs a coordinated and globally aligned response,” it says.
MacArthur’s foundation is committed to a circular economy as part of the approach to preventing millions of tonnes of plastic leaking into the environment, ending up in landfills or being burned.
The foundation says that the “take-make-waste” linear economy is “harming nature, using up natural resources, and contributing to the climate and biodiversity crises, while billions of dollars worth of valuable materials are being lost to the economy”.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and WWF initiative is timed for the UN Environment Assembly this month.
The organisations are calling for a treaty on plastic pollution that:
Has a clear focus on ways we can stop the problem before it starts - not just how to improve cleaning it up - through a circular economy approach;
Sets global standards, with common regulations applicable to all countries;
Supports all countries to play their part by giving them the tools, knowledge, and robust frameworks to create a circular economy for plastics.
The two organisations point to mounting pressure for a legally binding treaty, with over two million people having signed a WWF petition and more than three-quarters of UN member states backing those calls.
