Irish Examiner view: Everest of plastic must be tackled

Litter, including many plastics, washed up on a beach in Co Cork.

Plastic has been a miracle of modern invention. Like so many such innovations, it has a dark side.

Plastics, we now know, course through our bodies and those of millions of sea, air, and land-bound animals; they have been found in vast quantities in our oceans, even in the Arctic Sea, mountains, and lakes.

However, plastic is a man-made problem and, like so many other such issues of our own making, is something only we can solve as well. 

A recent international conference in Uruguay was aimed at creating a co-ordinated, worldwide effort to rid the globe of plastic pollution and provide hope an international treaty will ultimately be agreed on yet another pressing environmental crisis.

The United Nations Environment Programme says the world is dumping the equivalent of a rubbish truck of plastic into the seas every minute of every day, and the conference in Punta de Este is the start of a process by which plastic pollution will be ended by 2040.

Those who watched the unedifying antics of international players at the recent Cop27 talks in Egypt will not be enthused that an agreement on plastics will be achieved by the date being aimed at, but most are agreed that this is the most important environmental treaty negotiations in years.

The Uruguayan talks are the first of five meetings between now and 2024 to prepare a treaty on the issue as the world faces a triple crisis: safe limits for climate change, massive biodiversity loss, and unsustainable levels of pollution.

Plastics are at the heart of the latter, and there is little time for equivocation on the issue.