Nearly half a billion tonnes of plastic
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Rob Ralston of the University of Edinburgh talks to Critical Takes about the role of corporate power in the staggering growth of plastic pollution and waste and the prospects for a global treaty to curb it.
Including:
· How corporate power created a gigantic plastics problem … (to 4:02)
· … and has co-opted ideas about how to solve it, including recycling and the “circular economy” (to 14.44)
· Most countries want a strong global plastics treaty but a “petrochemical bloc” may succeed in weakening it (to 25:20)
· What next? China, India, the EU and coalitions of the willing.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Diarmid:
Hello, this is Critical Takes on Corporate Power and I'm Diarmid O'Sullivan.
Plastic pollution is everywhere nowadays. Plastic waste is all over our landscapes and in the oceans and microplastics have even entered in our bloodstreams. And as usual, corporate power is deeply implicated.
So I'm delighted to be talking to Rob Ralston, who is a lecturer in public policy at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, and has researched and written extensively about the role of corporate power in the global plastics problem. Rob, thank you very much for making time to talk.
So to start at the beginning, how would you characterize the global problem with plastics, and what is the role of corporate power in that problem?
Rob Ralston:
Just to offer some statistics, in 1950 there was two million tons of plastics being produced and by 2021 it's 390 million tons of plastics being produced globally. And the production of plastics is expected to triple by 2050 by some estimates.
The problem with plastics and the production of plastics is simply that we have vastly more single-use and disposable plastics being produced annually, and that inevitably creates problems of waste and pollution.
It's useful to distinguish between waste and pollution as two interlinked, very intimately connected problems linked to plastics. Waste being unwanted or unusable materials.
Plastics, particularly single-use plastics used for packaging, produce a lot of unusable materials. So say you have a plastic bottle that you bought and you discard it, often that will be unusable after the contents are consumed. As plastic production exponentially increases over the last five or six decades, that problem of waste just continues to grow and mount over time.
And then you also have the problem of pollution, which is more about the introduction of harmful materials into the environment. And clearly these things go together: if you produce waste that enters into the environment, then that often takes the form of pollution or can pollute the marine environment and other types of natural environment.
And so basically, as global plastic production is increased, waste has increased and therefore pollution has increased and will continue to do so. So similar to climate as a problem, we just have this escalating issue that we need to solve in order to address many of the impacts of pollution.
That’s very simply where we're at with plastic and plastic waste and pollution. As it grows, the environmental and health impacts grow also.
Diarmid:
Other than the obvious [point] that companies which produce and use plastics lobby for this, what has been the role of corporate power, not just in that staggering expansion of plastic production, but in the fact that it hasn't been reined in to date?
Rob Ralston:
Part of corporate power is the power over technology, the power to create markets or to destroy existing markets with new innovations, plastic being one example. When plastics are created or certain types of single-use plastics are created, it essentially leads to this creative destruction of existing consumer markets.
So if you think of products such as glass or aluminum, they are threatened basically by the invention of plastics, and plastics begins to become this dominant material that almost all consumer goods become packaged with. So there's that aspect of market and technology power being exercised by corporations to increase profitability, to increase market share or extend into new markets.
Where corporate power also comes into play is in protecting those markets or defending them in various ways from regulatory threats or from the threat of public backlash. I think you see this with recycling, where a lot of single-use plastics, the technologies are developed in the '60s and '70s, and petrochemical companies and several big food companies were all very interested in developing new plastics. They had identified this as this new frontier of growth, this potentially incredibly lucrative opportunity.
But what they also predicted at that time in the 1970s was there would be a backlash at some point: if we massively expand disposable plastics, at some point political actors, governments, politicians and the public will begin to notice that there's this huge problem of waste that landfill can't address. And their solution, their fix to this problem was recycling, and to promise that recycling could be expanded, that new innovations in recycling were on the horizon that could address the waste problem.
I think that's a really key part of understanding corporate power: it’s the power to shape cultural and societal norms around consumption. The key reason recycling is so successful is it's not necessarily a case of industry actors lobbying, although they do lobby against legislation, but effecting change on a deeper societal level of normalizing recycling and persuading publics that they could continue to consume single-use plastics without guilt. It was often being referred to as a guilt eraser.
So something that could ensure that disposability could expand and that single-use plastics could continue to be produced was this idea of making people feel as if that was environmentally sustainable and something they could continue to do without feeling guilty about it … I think a really crucial aspect of corporate power is actually affecting change on quite a deep level, at this kind of societal level.
Diarmid:
It's interesting you say that because for years now, probably like many listeners, I've been virtuously separating out the recycling and putting the plastic into … you know, now in the UK, they have these big bins in supermarkets where you can take your plastics.
And every time I pop a bit of waste plastic into this collection, I feel virtuous, you know? It’s, as you say, at such a deep psychological level. It's a kind of propitiation, isn't it. A little kind of ritual act that you carry out in order to justify going on and consuming in that way. And I did it this morning, you know?
There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance that comes up because you kind of know that's what you're doing. Like, I realize now because I've been reading your work and the work of other people. I know that when I'm doing this, I'm basically playing into this scheme that was invented in the 1970s precisely to do what it's doing.
You've been quite sceptical about the idea of the circular economy in this respect because the circular economy becomes a justification for not curbing consumption. What's your skepticism about that?
Rob Ralston:
If you look at the exercise of corporate power over a longer period of time so that the scope of analysis is several decades rather than years, that can reveal the more subtle ways in which corporate power operates and which influence operates.
So with recycling, I think that's quite a nice example of having this broader temporal scope lead you to focus in on questions around the ways in which corporations are almost setting the baseline against which policies are made … so they were essentially first movers in promoting recycling and governments essentially had to just follow that template because they'd normalized it, and it became something that was culturally embedded. That type of corporate influence is potentially much more powerful than successfully blocking a piece of legislation.
I think you can draw this through line of recycling for corporations and their version of the circular economy, which you could argue has become somewhat the dominant paradigm of the circular economy as a corporate-led one … And within the current circular economy paradigm, recycling is really a core focus in ways that are perhaps inconsistent with how the circular economy was originally articulated and developed.
When most people think of the circular economy, they think of an economy that is regenerative and restorative by design. So this idea of looping resources to minimize waste …
Diarmid:
… which is a positive idea, isn't it?
Rob Ralston:
Yeah, at its root, it's a positive concept. It’s rooted in ecological economics and the core idea of minimizing waste and, and really the circular economy should be minimizing the actual production and extraction of resources and using what you have in more efficient ways. So at its core, I certainly wouldn't argue that the basics of the idea as originally developed are incompatible with environmental sustainability.
I think the issue comes with it essentially being adopted by various corporate actors. This applies more broadly beyond plastics to lots of other corporate sectors, but you have companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, who've become very enthusiastic adopters of circular economy language alongside big petrochemical firms and big oil companies like Exxon and DowDuPont, who all become very vocal proponents of the circular economy.
And in doing so, I think they've successfully managed to adapt that idea to promote continued recycling. I would be skeptical or advise scrutiny that when certain claims are being made about a product or an approach being circular, that often really what's under the surface is continued recycling, which over the last five decades has proved to be inadequate in addressing the plastics crisis. So that would be my scepticism.
In terms of plastics specifically, I think there are technical limits to what you can achieve through a circular economy for plastics. So even if we imagine a system where we have perfect collection rates of plastics – as you said, people recycling plastics, carefully sorting them out - if we imagine a system where that is optimized, there's still a limited number of times a piece of plastic can be circulated or looped because every time you recycle plastic, there's an increased number of contaminants. It degrades in particular ways. It doesn't have this infinite recyclability that say something like glass might have.
So plastic as a material is very difficult to continue to recycle. There's only a certain amount of times you can do it and I think that's a real barrier to the circular economy for plastics.
Diarmid:
That’s a really important point: that it can only go round the circle a certain number of times and at the end of it you have a pile of waste.
Before we get onto the politics, I have to ask, do you diligently separate out your plastics and recycle them? Do you still do that, knowing what you know?
Rob Ralston:
Yeah, I do. I guess everyone does, which speaks to the normalization of recycling, that everyone diligently does it even while perhaps having doubts about its effectiveness.
I've been studying this area for three years, and my background is in corporate power, and I started off looking at the tobacco industry, then worked on the food industry, but much more around food and health and ultra-processed foods.
And I stumbled into looking at plastics in part because it just so happened that there were treaty negotiations that were in Paris and I was able to attend them. And something clicked in my head … all these other areas I'd studied where actually everything is about plastics and petrochemicals. So cigarettes have filters, they're made from plastics. Ultra-processed foods are packaged in plastics. And that kind of reoriented me to thinking about how these industries operate in a different way. And looking at petrochemicals as something that underpins the business models and the accumulation strategies of these industries.
And the more I've then looked into it, I'm feeling surprised at the extent to which many plastics can't actually be recycled. For me that, not really having scrutinized it before, was something I was very surprised at.
One example would be that the films you get on lots of types of plastic food packaging, the very thin plastic film - those things are very difficult to recycle. Most of those plastics are burnt or put in landfill and in high-income countries will just be shipped to various countries in the global South to be disposed of.
So there's those aspects where I think there's been strategies over decades of disinformation and misleading public relations campaigns mounted by corporations to promise or suggest that all types of plastic can be recycled when if you look at it, it's actually quite a small category or a small number of plastics that are actually suitable for recycling.
The main one would be something like a plastic bottle. That's probably the most recyclable piece of plastic, but there's all these other types of plastics that go into things like food packaging that simply can't be recycled and there's not the technologies or there's not the economies to do so.
Diarmid:
Let’s talk about a global plastics treaty. You've written about a “petrochemical historical bloc”, which is corporations which produce oil or petrochemicals or plastics and petrostates – because fossil fuels are the feedstock for plastics, which obviously tries to influence the negotiations for a global treaty.
So where have the negotiations got to, and how successful have these bloc has been in reducing the ambition of the treaty as it is now?
Rob Ralston:
Probably quite successful. The idea for using a bloc, which comes from the work of Antonio Gramsci, who's become an increasingly popular scholar in understanding where we're at with this fracturing global order, this increased geoeconomic competition. Many people have turned to Gramscian thinking again.
Really what we were trying to capture was that concept, and hopefully in an accessible way, that alliances aren't just made up of industry. They're often very diverse. In the case of what we call the petrochemical bloc, it's big petrostates, it's private finance, it's also often civil society organizations who are lending some degree of legitimacy to the project. It’s about collectively sustaining a paradigm in which plastics continue to be produced and and used … That's what the bloc aims to achieve.
In the plastics treaty, this bloc is confronted by a counter-movement or a competing bloc of actors who are pushing for a more effective approach to regulating plastics at the global level. Based on the current alliances that exist, it is the majority of states who are opposed to this petrochemical bloc. You have a majority of countries who actually do want global limits on the production of plastics. They want what's termed “chemicals of concern” in plastics to be regulated much more stringently, and so on.
So you have these two competing blocs around which the treaty's being negotiated. In terms of the current status, the treaty's had fluctuating fortunes … at one point it seemed that there was potential for actually quite an effective legal environmental agreement in the sense that there was a draft text that had committed to addressing human health. There was, at one point, optimism that there would be a cap or some kind of global target for the reduction of plastic.
[But] the treaty basically stalled in 2025. It was meant to be wrapped up in August 2025 in Geneva, and those negotiations lasted for more or less two weeks, and it ended up in a somewhat acrimonious situation where the chair subsequently resigns, no text is adopted, and states simply can't agree are these two blocs. There's just fundamental differences about what aspects the treaty should address.
I think in part this problem relates more broadly to the unanticipated consequences of trying to address the full life cycle of plastics. Up until around 2017 or 2018, plastic was primarily understood in terms of waste. You had UN agencies like the UN Environment Programme, and they're the agency that the treaty's being negotiated under. They provide the secretariat and are steering the process. They had programmes which talked about marine litter, waste.
But one of the issues with the treaty, and why you have these two competing blocs and such high degrees of political contestation, is that in the UN resolution that leads to the treaty negotiation starting, it talks about the full life cycle of plastics. And in doing so, it opens up plastic not only to waste management or what happens to plastics when they leak into the environment or they're disposed in some way, but to every other stage of the plastic production process. It's a bit like opening Pandora's box, that it becomes a question about extraction and chemicals that are used in production or chemicals that leach into the environment or that affect human health.
I don't know whether states expected it to unfold in this way, but I think this was an inevitable consequence of states maybe not exactly knowing what they were getting into in committing to develop a treaty that would address plastics throughout its life cycle.
This is why we've ended up with such fundamental consequences, because if you think of plastic as waste and litter, then the treaty should be a waste management treaty. But if your concern - which is the concern of many NGOs, environmental campaigners, the majority of states - if your concern is to address plastics across its life cycle, then it becomes way more than waste management. And I think this is where we're at, where there's real fundamental conflicts.
So to bring us up to date, the former chair has resigned, a new chair has been elected and there's scheduled to be another round of treaty negotiations which will be the sixth round of treaty talks since 2022 when they started. It seems like the approach the chair has taken is to identify areas of common interest and consensus and to really pursue or to target those areas as a means to break the deadlock.
And so recently there was what's called the head of delegation meetings, [which are] quite select informal meetings that the chair would have with the heads of the different state delegations. [In contrast to] something like the climate treaty, these COP events with thousands of attendees, these meetings are very small and selective.
But what's come out of that is that several of the areas that would be needed for an effective treaty, so around the production of plastics, around chemicals, around even the processes of decision-making for the treaty, they've all been excluded. And I think the reason for that is to avoid areas of fundamental conflict.
So one of the outcomes, if we get a treaty, might be that the treaty is really a lowest common denominator.
My hope would be that certain states who want an effective treaty would essentially reject that proposal. But I think this is where we're at: the treaty only reflects areas of convergence [and] there are very fundamental differences, and it's unlikely a treaty could be effective if it excludes something like the production of plastics.
Diarmid:
That's a problem, of course, we see elsewhere, most obviously in fossil fuels: the difficulty of getting a global consensus among states. And states have their interests, and then the process, even the framing of the process, is heavily influenced by corporate interests, and it's very difficult to see what a meaningful consensus would look like.
And then that poses the question: can you get regional agreements which achieve some of [what’s needed] and eventually become global norms? For instance, were there any of the regional blocs, the European Union for instance, which can take this kind of regulation forward at a regional level?
Rob Ralston:
I think some recent developments in the climate space provide lessons or potential models for how states might proceed with plastics. The example would be the Santa Marta conference on fossil fuel phase outs which is essentially a coalition of the willing that has developed, I think principally between Colombia and Netherlands, and many small island states as well [in reaction to] a frustration with the UNFCCC and COPs and if not the refusal, the challenges of getting fossil fuels even mentioned in those spaces.
And interestingly, at the Santa Marta conference, petrochemicals feature as part of fossil fuel phase out, so it's not simply fossil fuels as energy, it's also fossil fuels as feedstock.
Hopefully the momentum around that might be seen as attractive for some states, particularly the more ambitious ones. Tthe small island states in the plastics treaty space, similar to climate, are definitely amongst the most ambitious. So I think there is potential for this mini-lateralism or coalitions of the willing.
But with petrostates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has Aramco, which is the world’s biggest oil company. You also have the US under Trump 2.0 becoming much more aggressively opposed to any kind of regulation of plastics, any kind of suggestion of, limits on production.
Recently there was a leaked memo that was sent to other delegations from the US, that the Washington Post ran a story on (paywall), calling for a waste management approach and urging states to reject any kind of regulation of chemicals on national security grounds.
So there's a number of petrostates, including the US, who it would seem make it almost impossible to have a treaty that includes provisions that could effectively reduce plastics.
I guess this ultimately will come down to voting arrangements really, and again, another similarity with climate where really the most successful form of climate obstruction, you could argue, is in ensuring that the UNFCCC had voting arrangements which were based on consensus rather than a qualified majority. And this is what it’s going to come down to with the plastics treaty, if we get one.
Diarmid:
Let me conclude with a question that I ask everybody, which is: how optimistic do you feel that this can be overcome? In other words, that a coalition of states and civil society actors and others who want a more holistic approach to the plastic problem might be able to win through over obstructionism from the petrochemical industry and the petrostates.
On a scale of one to 10, how optimistic do you feel at the moment?
Rob Ralston:
I would say in terms of one to 10, maybe a six. I think you have to be optimistic, to feel like things can change and that there can be transformations. The plastics treaty is an interesting case: it feels like it's in the eye of the storm in terms of much broader attempts to erode, to bypass, or to sabotage the multilateral system, and I guess more generally what you might call the liberal international order.
And whether or not the plastics treaty will survive that, I'm certainly sympathetic to officials within the UN agencies who are really struggling with a very different set of geoeconomic and political circumstances than has been the case for the past three decades. I think in terms of the potential for change, it may really hedge on the ability of ambitious states to persuade China and India to commit to addressing plastics and plastics pollution. And if there were a coalition of the willing, it would really need to involve one, probably both of those countries to have any chance being successful.
I guess China's an interesting case – does China qualify as a petrostate given that it does have a large petrochemical industry, but does seem, at least on the face of it, more open to the idea of production caps and to take the health impacts of plastics pollution quite seriously, at least from what I can tell from the plastic treaty talks.
But the optimism would really be that some coalition of the willing might be possible in plastics if we don't get a treaty. I think maybe this all hinges on this upcoming round of plastic treaty talks, which are not 100 per cent confirmed, but expected to take place in around March next year … It has very much been the signal from the chair that this will be the wrapping up of the treaty and we will have a text. What I would hope is that if there is no treaty or if states reject a weak treaty text, then we might see a movement towards something similar to these climate clubs, but for plastics.
And in which case, I think I maybe would be quite optimistic actually about the potential for that to actually affect change, particularly if the EU is involved because it's such a big market and it can actually affectthe global economy of plastics if supported by other states.
So overall I sort of retain an optimism, but somewhat qualified and cautious depending on where we end up with these treaty talks.
Diarmid:
That's been absolutely fascinating and very informative. I'm now going to literally go into my kitchen and look at the bin, which I’ve filled with bits of plastic, and have a long think about what it is that I'm looking at.
So thank you very much, Rob, for making time to talk.
Rob Ralston:
Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
The transcript ends here.