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FBR March 2016

S o picture this: The year is 2050. There is more plastic by weight in the oceans than fish. Our love for plastic has grown so big that the plastics industry is now consuming 20% of the world’s oil and contributing 15% of the global carbon budget (that’s the amount we dare not exceed if we are to keep global warming below 2C) ... The world sure loves plastic (and the foodbev industry is totally besotted with the stuff) … but we don’t have to go down this path to hell if we start applying circular economy principles to global plastic packaging flows. A circular economy is one that is restorative and regenerative by design. And it could transform the plastics economy and drastically reduce environmental damage such as leakage into oceans, according to the latest report by the World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics, released earlier this year, provides for the first time a vision of This report demonstrates the importance of triggering a revolution in the plastics industrial ecosystem and is a first step to showing how to transform the way plastics move through our economy. To move from insight to large scale action, it is clear that no one actor can work on this alone; the public, private sector and civil society all need to mobilize in order to capture the opportunity of the new circular plastics economy. - Dominic Waughray World Economic Forum a global economy in which plastics never become waste, and outlines concrete steps towards achieving the systemic shift needed. The report was produced as part of Project MainStream, a global, multi-industry initiative that aims to accelerate business-driven innovations to help scale the circular economy. The report acknowledges that while plastics and plastic packaging are an integral part of the global economy and deliver many benefits, their value chains are hugely problematic. Assessing global plastic packaging flows comprehensively for the first time, the report finds that most plastic packaging is used only once; 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy. That’s apart from the environmental damage worth billions and billions more. In this context, says the report, an opportunity beckons for the plastics It’s a plastic hell, or we choPLASTICS

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