In Ottawa, negotiations aimed at signing an international treaty limiting plastic pollution moved in the right direction during a penultimate cycle, which ended Tuesday April 30. A summit placed under the aegis of the United Nations and attended by Marie-France Dignac and Jean-François Ghiglione, two researchers at Sorbonne University. The establishment is the first French university to be accredited by the United Nations Environment Program, allowing it to take part in international negotiations.
🔗 Extract from Sorbonne University website
One more step towards the end of plastic. During the fourth intergovernmental round of negotiations on plastic pollution, which was held from April 22 to 30 in Ottawa (Canada), with representatives of 175 countries who discussed a text aimed at limiting the production of this ecological time bomb on a global scale. The objective of these negotiations, the last round of which will take place next fall in South Korea, is to develop a legally binding international instrument on plastic pollution, particularly in the marine environment, while global production has reached 353 million tons in 2019 (of which only 9% were recycled), according to the OECD.
A step forward towards a global treaty
During the recently concluded session, 28 countries, including France, signed a declaration on primary plastic polymers, the materials that form the basis of the manufacture of plastics, in order to reduce their production. Rwanda and Peru have even committed to reducing their production by 40% between 2025 and 2040. “We are asking that manufacturers demonstrate more transparency by revealing in particular the list of chemical additives. There are more than 16,000 of them in commercially sold plastics, 3,000 of which are dangerous,” warns Jean-François Ghiglione, CNRS research director at the Banyuls-sur-Mer Oceanological Observatory (Sorbonne University/CNRS).
Publication of the collection “Plastic: such a practical poison”
Around forty researchers from the Sorbonne University Alliance have written twenty fact sheets on the problem of plastic, driven by a concern for pedagogy and the imperative of rigor. The authors are chemists, agronomists, microbiologists, virologists, ecotoxicologists, neuroendocrinologists, ecologists, oceanographers, marine biologists… Only such a variety of skills makes it possible to approach a crisis of universal magnitude like that of plastic pollution.
Read the fact sheets from our experts.
Colombini Gabin, post doc IRD of CoMiC/DCFE and FEST/Sols_ZC teams, Dignac Marie-France DR INRAE of CoMiC/DCFE team and Siaussat David Pr Sorbonne University of CReA/EcoSens team, are co-autors iEES Paris of this collection.
