environment

U.N. aims to deliver draft plastics treaty by year's end

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By Benjamin LEGENDRE

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You can reduce plastic production when you have viable, equivalent alternatives - ones that do not decimate food production, healthcare and the economy (which pays for public services via taxes), and which do not penalise people for being old or disabled. Or you can expect trouble.

Just limiting production will see prices rocket. Did you enjoy the inflation, economic damage and scarcity from sanctions on Russian energy? That is just a drop in the ocean compared to what you would get if you reduce plastic production without having equivalents that scale up.

Plastics are fundamental to the modern world. They enabled mass production, globalised food production and healthcare, and reduced the burden on women, enabling (painfully slow and incomplete) moves towards equality. So unless you want to unravel that, and send humanity back to a pre-industrial past, most living a subsistence lifestyle in fear of hunger, illness and the workhouse, there better be alternatives, and ones that can be produced at the same scale as plastics, and similar cost and without impacting the environment more seriously. Everything has to be made of something, so come up with the replacements first.

Brexit seemed like a great idea to many. Not so much now that they are feeling the effects of it. There are only so many times governments can break stuff before they are removed from power, and by more direct means than an election.

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