Richard Thompson on ways to address the plastics pollution problem

Richard Thompson was a grad student in marine ecology 30 years ago when he encountered plastic litter on shores where he had set up experiments. "Every day I'd (have) litter arriving and I had to clear it from the experiments to do the science, but it kept coming back," he recalls. During voluntary beach cleans with fellow students, he noticed there was no category to document extremely small pieces of plastic that were barely visible to the naked eye. Later, in a study published in 2004 (bit.ly/microplastics-science), Thompson and colleagues referred to these microscopic plastic fragments as 'microplastics'. With this study recording their abundance in the marine environment and ingestion by marine organisms, Thompson drew attention to these smallest of plastics posing one of the biggest threats to our oceans.

Thompson is now Director of the Marine Institute at the University of Plymouth, U.K. He is a co-ordinator of the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty — a network of scientists contributing evidence to the United Nations (U.N.) global plastics treaty, currently under negotiation. In an interview to Shaastra, he speaks to the shift that must take place towards finding solutions to the plastics problem. Excerpts:

It's been over 20 years since you published the paper on microplastics. How much do we know about how microplastics impact human health by way of ingestion through food, water and air?

We certainly know that microplastics are in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. We know less about their effects on human health than we do about effects on many other organisms — and that's typically the way science unfolds around toxicology. So, whilst the evidence around human health effects is only starting to unfold and a lot of it is associational, it is going to be really difficult to establish a cause-and-effect because we're influenced by so many different things in the environment. There's no reason to imagine we wouldn't see that evidence over time because we're not that different to the rest of nature.

Do we really need to wait for that evidence to act when it's really clear now that plastics are affecting a wide range of species? We could wait a decade and spend millions, billions even, trying to explore effects on human health. Maybe some of that money would be better spent on working towards solutions.

In terms of solutions, what's the current state of research?

It's lagging behind. If I were a philanthropist wanting to invest in this problem, I don't think I'd be throwing money at human health effects or trying to clean up the oceans while they continue to be contaminated at an ever-increasing rate. What I would want to fund, and the same applies to government funding bodies for science, are solutions. We now know there's a problem, but we're really unclear about the solutions.

Regrettably, we're starting to see things come onto the marketplace that claim to be a solution but are not properly tried and tested. We'll just continue to repeat the same mistakes if we're not putting in place proper environmental checks and balances. So, we need much bigger investments around solutions, particularly in designing novel approaches, but also making sure those approaches are rigorously tested so that the alternatives are genuinely and measurably better, not just something different.

That brings me to 'biodegradable' plastics...

If we're producing novel materials that are designed to degrade rapidly and harmlessly in the environment, we have to be sure there's clarity on which environment is it that we're talking about. One of the studies we did with carrier bags that claimed to be biodegradable or compostable showed that they might disintegrate more quickly in one environment but not in another.

There are four things that have made conventional plastics successful: they're inexpensive, lightweight, durable and versatile. So, it is a little bit challenging to design a product that has that durability that we all depend on, whether it's carrying crisps or lemonade, but somehow is going to magically disappear the minute we don't want it.

You said you wouldn't invest in ocean clean-up. Do the technologies that physically and chemically remove plastics from the oceans even work?

What does it need to do to work to your definition of work, mine and those that make them might be slightly different. So, we've tested devices that you put in harbours to clean up plastic and they worked in one sense: they collected over several days a very small amount of plastic. But over that same time, they'd caught dozens of fish, which were now dead, and seaweed, which we want to leave in the marine environment. In my view, it's not the place to put the investment.

We have to stop the plastic going into the sea, rather than hope that once it gets there, and when it's dispersed across the ocean surface, reached the deep sea or the Arctic and contaminated species, that somehow, we're going to come up with a technological fix that's going to pull it all out. The technology we need to develop has to be around better design.

If we're not careful, the public, who also need to be part of this action, and the industries that are making unsustainable products, will have this belief that there's some device out there that's going to solve all of those problems for them.

Do you see the U.N. global plastics treaty getting implemented anytime soon?

I remain optimistic. It's always going to be challenging in any international negotiation; there are going to be winners and losers. But if we don't get this right, we're all going to lose. All of the species on the planet are going to lose.

There are a number of different endpoints to the treaty. You'd hope that we get a strong, legally binding treaty that all of the world's nations were aligned with. It's going to be the hardest but also the best. Then, you've got other options that are less ideal. You could have all of the countries signing up to something that was very weak or that hadn't yet reached agreement on some of the key matters. I'd rather see an ambitious treaty that involved fewer countries with a view to grow that over time when, hopefully, there's realisation that this is going to make economic as well as environmental sense for all.

Until nations reach an agreement, is individual action going to be enough?

It's a key part of it. We all use plastic in our daily lives — it's unavoidable. So, small actions by many can indeed achieve quite a lot. But it's going to be impossible for us to achieve the success we need without products that are appropriately designed. We've got lots of non-essential products that we don't need though there might be a market for them. The microbeads in cosmetics is an example. They're gone in some countries (like the U.K.). It is going to take legislation to prohibit such non-essential uses.

Moving down the waste hierarchy, I've just covered reduce, then you go to reuse and recycle. There's very little the individual consumer can do if reuse formats are not available for the kind of products they're wanting to buy — and a lot of this is packaging. Over 40% of all the plastic we make is destined for single-use packaging. If it's not designed in such a way that makes it compatible with locally available circular systems, either via reuse or recycling, then there's very little the consumer can do.

Product designers tell me that end-of-life of the products was never in the brief; they were asked to design products that worked and were attractive to the consumer, but they've never been asked or paid to design a product that's safer and more sustainable. So, why should we be surprised by the abysmal array of products that we see in our supermarkets, many of which have got a little triangle on the bottom saying they're recyclable, but it doesn't mean they will or can be locally recycled. There's been a complete lack of prioritisation within industries to consider end-of-life even for those very short-lived products. Of course, it's about the economics but we need a better business model that encompasses extended producer responsibility.

What will it take for the world to put an end to plastic pollution?

Sometimes, regrettably, it takes some sort of tragedy. I'll go back to the human health effects: that would make really powerful evidence, but we're still going to need a solution. We've taken lead out of petrol, microbeads out of cosmetics, and CFCs out of aerosols, and the world still functions. It's going to involve all of us working together across the public, society, industry and policy. There are solutions that can be found and some of that is going to take innovation.