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Addressing marine plastics: A roadmap to a circular economy

GEF-UNEP-EMF/New Plastic Economy/OC/GRIDA Marine Plastics Project

By IW:LEARN

December 23^rd, 2020

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Marine Plastics Project marked a milestone on 18 November 2020. It launched the project’s signature report called “Addressing Marine Plastics: A Roadmap to a Circular Economy” to an audience of 145 webinar attendees representing 45 countries. This publication distills major knowledge, lessons and key insights that project partners learned in implementing plastics initiatives at scales ranging from global to local. Its overarching goal is to provide a roadmap that applies a systemic approach to the problem of plastics. This can enable stakeholders including governments, businesses, donors, and civil society organizations, to design and transform their plastics programmes into working models of circular economies at scale.

Addressing marine plastics: A roadmap to a circular economy

If everyone shares the vision to have earth’s ecosystems from land to sea become plastics-free, then it is imperative that plastics programmes examine the problem from multiple vantage points along the plastics value chain: from production, consumption, waste generation, collection, recycling, and end-of-product life disposal. At each stage are problems and solutions, and addressing single stages in isolation, is inadequate to solve the current scale of the plastics problem. System-wide, not stage-specific, approaches offer opportunities to transform the linear make-take-waste consumption into one where high-quality, toxin-free and totally reusable and recyclable plastics circulate in the economy, not in ecosystems.

What actions constitute a circular economy approach? The roadmap identifies 4 building blocks to achieve a circular economy of plastics including:

Creating cross-cutting enabling conditions
Eliminating all problematic and unnecessary plastic products including toxic additives
Innovating product design and business models towards delivery of reusable, recyclable or compostable toxic additive-free plastics
Circulating plastics in the economy at their highest value and keeping them OUT of the environment.

For each of the four building blocks, the roadmap identifies a core set of priority solutions to be implemented by targeted stakeholders from the whole plastics value chain under different time horizons, and at different geographic scales

In launching the roadmap, the webinar featured the major experiences of partner organizations including the UN Environment Programme (Economy and Ecosystems Divisions), the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastics Economy, Ocean Conservancy and GRID-Arendal. In addition, it highlighted the successes and challenges of plastics programmes in the Caribbean, the Philippines and Seychelles, in order to calibrate the feasibility of implementing the suggested actions in the roadmap. The launch of the roadmap is a culminating activity for the GEF Marine Plastics Project, and augurs the next generation of initiatives that hopefully will be systemic and transformative in solving the plastics plague.

A full recording of the webinar and downloadable versions of the presentations are available here. Project publications with summaries may be accessed here and as listed by partner institution here.

About the GEF Marine Plastics Project

The project “Addressing Marine Plastics: A Systemic Approach” is implemented by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and executed by four partner institutions: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy (NPEC), Ocean Conservancy (OC), UNEP Economy and Ecosystems Divisions, and GRID-Arendal. With catalytic assistance from the GEF, the Marine Plastics Project aims to map out a strategic roadmap for mitigating marine plastics, building on key pilot interventions, and to cause a transformational shift towards a circular economy for plastics.

For more information on GEF Marine Plastics Project, please contact the GEF-UNEP Project Coordinator, Liana McManus (liana.mcmanus@grida.no), or the Senior Specialist - Ecosystem Management, Tiina Kurvits (tiina.kurvits@grida.no) and visit the project website as well as the project page on iwlearn.net.