S17E1: Why It's No Longer About Recycling

Sustainable Asia

We need other solutions to the plastic waste crisis. Solutions that involve reduce, reuse, refill and repair here in Asia. And those types of solutions…need to be included in the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations. The Global Plastics Treaty agreement is not a mechanism to control plastic waste. It is a roadmap for the world to control the life cycle of plastics that have come to dominate our natural environment and impact our health in ways we still don’t fully understand.

So that’s what we are going to talk about in this episode. Luckily, I had the opportunity to speak with two incredibly knowledgeable people about this. Marian Ledesma, Zero Waste Campaigner with Greenpeace Southeast Asia based in Manila, who will be attending the INC-2 meetings in Paris next week. Greenpeace Southeast Asia is a Break Free From Plastic member organization, and Marian has a deep knowledge of the plastic crisis here in Asia, as well as how to focus policies so that single use plastic…with all of its health and environmental impacts…can be eliminated from our lives. My other guest Darina Maulana, of Enviu Indonesia based in Jakarta, works with startups in the reuse and refill space in Indonesia. She has a hands-on view of what types of programs and regulations work in megacities in Asia…so that single use plastic consumption can be dramatically reduced…if not totally eliminated!

To wrap up we talk about what you listeners can do to support their efforts at the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations….

Production credits:

Host: Marcy Trent Long

Producer: Carol Mang

Contributing Editor: Jill Baxter

Intro/outro music: Alex Mauboussin

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Resources:

We have partnered with Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), headquartered in Asia, to produce this series. BFFP has numerous resources on their website about the Global Plastics Treaty and the Reuse | Refill | Repair initiative:

https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/plastics-treaty/

https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/2023/04/28/youth-summit-2023-global-plastics-treaty/

Video Credits:

UN Agrees to Roadmap for global plastic pollution treaty, The World

The Truth About Plastic Recycling..It’s Complicated, Undecided with Matt Ferrell