2023-11-18 10:07:09
Published on Nov 18, 2023 at 9:07 a.m.
After carbon credits, plastic credits. In its recommendations submitted ahead of the Nairobi discussions for an international treaty against plastic pollution, the Verra company calls for the use of “plastic credits” to support the objectives. The non-profit organization, already active in the carbon market, recently launched its own plastic credits. It is not the only one to position itself on this market, by offering manufacturers the opportunity to finance waste collection and recycling actions, or to invest indirectly in waste management infrastructure.
Presented as “a piece of the puzzle” to fight against pollution by businesses, the system is also fiercely criticized by associations. The initial idea is to “adopt the best practices of carbon credits and apply them to plastic”, promises for example on its PCX Markets website. For its part, CleanHub, founded in 2020, already claims to have collaborated with 300 brands and collected six million kilos of plastic waste.
Stop the machine
Most of their activity, which is based on “the promise to collect a certain quantity of plastic waste”, is concentrated in Asia, such as in the Philippines, where the government requires manufacturers to collect their waste themselves or to call on an external company. “There are 2 billion people in the world who are not connected to effective waste management. Plastic credits make it possible to finance their collection and create waste management infrastructure,” says CleanHub co-founder Louis Pfitzner. To date, the company is involved in the construction of eleven waste management infrastructure projects of different sizes.
The promise made to manufacturers is to collect waste, but also sometimes to be supported in the design of their packaging. “Consumers hate plastic, but brands cannot take effective action immediately. By purchasing plastic credits, they can, however, say that for each product sold, a given quantity of plastic is collected,” explains Louis Pfitzner.
Nanowaste impossible to collect
Yes, but here it is: if the idea seems “good at the start”, it rather has “the opposite effect”, regrets Henri Bourgeois-Costa, director of public affairs at the Tara Ocean Foundation. At the heart of this skepticism, the inability of plastic credits to stop the machine. The mechanism amounts to acting “as if each kilo collected made it possible to produce another” and “prevents companies from confronting the problem”, while “the urgency is above all to establish production reduction objectives and toxicity.
Above all, it only makes it possible to reduce the damage caused by the end of life of certain plastics, without taking into account those which occur at the beginning and middle of the chain, nor the “nanowaste located in water, soil and earth”. Impossible to collect due to their size, they represent 40% of the volume, points out Henri Bourgeois-Costa. Especially since a significant part of the waste thus collected, which cannot be recycled, is often incinerated without taking into account the dangerousness of the process, he still regrets.
Under certain conditions, by regulating and redefining them, plastic credits could however make sense “temporarily”. The public affairs director of Tara Ocean, for example, imagines the establishment, by the international community, of a monomer production quota for the least polluting among them. This would “clearly assign a value to a quantity of plastic”, and should be applied in all regions of the world according to development challenges. The discussions taking place in Nairobi are, however, “infinitely far” from the outcome of such a system, the urgency being elsewhere.
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