[Environmental activists and volunteers walking along the beach with bags of litter]
[Volunteer picking out litter from seaweed and from between the rocks]
[Clean up volunteers walking along beach]
[Sacks of collected plastic waste]
[Floating waste accumulated behind trash barrier in Bosnia’s Drina River]
[Clean up operation on the ground with mechanical grabber picking up waste to put into truck]
[Waste covering a whole section of the river]
[Workers collecting vast amounts of plastic waste and sorting through it]
Dr. Karine Siegwart (interview): “Plastic now it’s everywhere. It’s in our freshwater. It’s in rivers and lakes…I’m coming from Switzerland. We find microplastic in every lake in the mountains and in the soil, in the air. Plastic is everywhere, and it’s in the bodies of human beings and species and ecosystems are very affected. And we have to be aware that biodiversity and ecosystems they are the basis of society and economies. We are depending really on water that we can drink and, ecosystems that are healthy.”
[Workers loading sacks of plastic waste onto lorry]
[Waste sack full of plastic bottles]
[Lorry and waste sacks still to be loaded]
[Workers gathering sacks of plastic]
[State-of-the-art plastic sorting facility designed to receive 200,000 tons of plastic household waste a year]
Professor Richard Thompson (interview): “We’ve got dozens of different types of plastic, hundreds of different chemical formulations and many of them are doing the same job and that creates a problem at the end of life, because in order to to increase, you know, recycling, we’re still doing, in my view, a very poor job of, you know, less than 10% of the plastic we produce is being recycled and that’s partly because we failed to design plastic products with end of life in mind. So we’ve got an incredible diversity, a complexity of different chemicals that are used to do essentially the same job. And we’re going to need to strip that back to reduce that complexity if we’ve got hopes of increasing the amount of material that can be circular.”
[Forklift truck operating in of state-of-the-art plastic sorting facility designed to receive 200,000 tons of plastic household waste a year]
Dr. Karine Siegwart (interview): “We are facing a triple planetary crisis. It’s climate, it’s biodiversity loss and pollution. And the negotiations for a plastic treaty is embedded in this triple planetary crisis and should, by its outcome, also contribute to fight this triple planetary crisis.”
[Fish swimming around coral]
[Sea turtle on coral]
Dr. Karine Siegwart (interview): “Countries had with the global biodiversity framework adopted almost one and a half years ago, they had addressed the issue of plastic pollution with a biodiversity lens and so it’s important that the future plastic treaty refers to these obligations to fighting plastic pollution, because biodiversity is endangered with this issue.”
[A waterway leading down to the sea choked up with plastic and other waste]
[Tisza river]
[Rags and plastic waste in and around river]
Professor Richard Thompson (interview): “Whatever solution we’re looking at, it’s really important that it’s tried and tested to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. So we’ve evaluated the University of Plymouth devices intended, mechanical devices to clean up plastic from ports and harbours, and we found that they were catching fish and seaweed, that, of course, you want to leave in the ocean and the quantity of plastic was actually quite small. So I think the key thing is there’s a there’s a demand for approaches to tackle the problem. We’re aware there’s a global environmental problem. What do we do about it and to me that’s absolutely at the heart of that is we need evidence to make sure that the things we’re doing to try to make the planet better are actually really working and are not causing more harm.”
[Volunteers in canoes and rafts collecting plastic rubbish from the River Tisza]
Professor Richard Thompson (interview): “You could apply that to clean up devices. You could apply it to to filters. You could apply it to the use of biodegradable or compostable plastics it’s making sure that as we strive to solve the the problem of plastic pollution, and we’ve got evidence to guide us on the way forward towards, you know, a better outcome for the environment.”
[Hub for the exchange of used materials]
[People in market]
[Sheep foraging food in the snow]
[Plastic waste]
[Woman walking to waste bin]
[Woman sorting through waste]
Professor Richard Thompson (interview): “Clean up is not a centre stage solution. We can’t rely on clean up alone, otherwise we simply condemning our children and children’s children to contaminate the environment in the hope that we might just clean it all up later on. We need much more systemic solutions, and that has to start with reduction in the total volumes of plastic we’re producing.”
[Divers emptying the rubbish sacks collected from the Gulf of Aqaba and Red Sea]
[Collected rubbish from the sea]
Senator Jeff Merkley (interview): “So is this just going to be a feel good conversation? With no kind of anything that really drives change? Or is it going to lay out ambitious goals as a modest number of nations want nations as diverse as Norway and Rwanda. But in general, the fossil fuel countries and plastics are made from fossil, gas or methane, they don’t they don’t want anything that’s that ambitious.”
[Man working in plastic processing center]
[Stacks of pressed plastic bottles outside processing center]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.