Who Owns the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a rotating vortex of plastic debris, now spans three times the size of France, holding an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. That number keeps climbing not because solutions don't exist, but because the industry responsible for managing plastic waste has little financial reason to shrink it.

Since 1950, the world has produced 6300 million tonnes of plastic waste. Of that, roughly 9% has been recycled; the rest was incinerated, landfilled, or leaked into the environment, much of it eventually funnelled into gyres like the Pacific patch.  

Waste companies operate on what Kirstie Pecci, Conservation Law Foundation’s Zero Waste Project Director, calls a “trash-to-cash” pipeline, where profits are based on the amount of processed plastic waste. The more plastic production, collection and deposition in landfill, the more this system earns. Pecci argues these companies will “fight tooth and nail” against actual waste reduction, which could cost waste companies hundreds of millions of dollars in New England alone. 

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This is the conflict of interest sitting underneath the garbage patch: incentivising companies to clean plastic up is not a logistical issue, but a revenue-based barrier. Responsibility is redirected to consumers - sorting recycling bins and cleaning up beaches - rather than producers, whose business models depend on high volumes of plastic. 

Real change would mean changing legislation regarding these producers. In Europe, companies are required to pay tax on plastic packaging and fees for collection and recycling of products. The European Organization for Packaging and the Environment estimates that the industry pays  €3.1 billion in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees every year. The U.S. has not quite caught up to this: only some states enforce EPR laws, which require businesses to fund or manage plastic waste, and no federal scheme exists. Extending these policies nationally could shift the financial burden of plastic pollution back onto the producers, rather than leaving it to accumulate, quite literally, in oceanic garbage patches.

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For more information contact: info@scarabtrust.org.uk

Image: Plastic waste and clothing floating in sea - Image by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash (ST ref: 1223)