The stream of plastic pollution: could a global treaty help us turn off the tap?

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Guardian Seascapes reporter Karen McVeigh tells Madeleine Finlay about a recent trip to the Galápagos Islands, where mounds of plastic waste are washing up and causing problems for endemic species. Tackling this kind of waste and the overproduction of plastic were the topics on the table in Ottawa this week, as countries met to negotiate a global plastics treaty. But is progress too slow to address this pervasive problem?. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Guardian. Get your morning mojo going with Mullah like Greek style.
0:17.0	Now with a new recipe, with Vitamin B6 and Vitamin D. Let's have it!
0:25.0	Mull-a-light, get the good going. The Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, home to species found nowhere else on the planet
0:46.9	and birthplace of Darwin's theory of evolution.
0:50.0	Oh, a mancery, a m, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a
0:53.0	man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man a lawyer, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a, a, a visited the islands recently she saw her fair share of incredible wildlife.
1:05.5	Oh well there's lots of pelicans now. But there was something else in abundance too.
1:11.9	So what we can see here is a lot of Asian bottles, there's a lot of Peruvian bottles.
1:18.0	We've just seen an iguana unable to cross the plastic because of the concentration of plastic.
1:26.2	Plastic has become the defining pollutant of our age.
1:30.8	It's been found in the sea, air, food, and even inside us. But there's a cruel irony to how plastics
1:39.1	are ending up in the Galapagos. Currents actually are the source of life in the Galapagos. Currents actually are the source of life in the Galapagos and the
1:46.0	currents brought the species here at the beginning but at the same time now in
1:52.1	this globalized world the currents also bring the plastics from everywhere
1:56.5	to the coastlines of the Galapagos.
1:59.8	And it's not just a problem of rubbish. Annual production of plastics has boomed. In 2019 we made
2:07.2	four hundred and sixty million tons of the stuff and that's set to double or even triple by 2050 eating up a fifth of the
2:17.4	earth's remaining carbon budget. But change could be on the horizon.
2:24.0	Over the past week in a conference centre in Ottawa, Canada,
2:28.0	governments from around the world have been negotiating
2:32.0	the most important environmental deal since the 2015 Paris
2:36.4	agreement on climate change, the Global Plastic Treaty. So today we're visiting the Galapagos to see how our waste is changing life there
	...

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