4.10 A Circular Economy for Plastics

FIGURE 4.10

A Circular Economy for Plastics

Raw materials / finite resources / virgin plastics

Production using recycled and recovered materials

Resource recovery and waste management

A circular economy

Consumption and reuse

Source: Adapted from Defra and EA 2018. Permission for adaptation granted under the terms of UK Open Government Licence v3.0.

Unlike the traditional “take-make-dispose” linear economy, the circular economy proposes a fundamental rethinking of the product life cycle— improving recycling, promoting reuse, creating a market for recycled materials, and redesigning products with solutions that keep products’ end of life in mind. The circular-economy approach includes as a core principle the collaborative engagement of all relevant stakeholders along the value chain (EMAF 2017; Geissdoerfer et al. 2017).

Implementing this framework, although simple conceptually, requires that various challenges be addressed in the way plastics are consumed, produced, and discarded. In today’s economy, plastic packaging represents 40 percent of the total production of plastic products and contributes 80 percent of plastic leakage into the ocean (Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ 2020). Plastic packaging is typically single-use, ubiquitous, and extremely difficult to recycle. The global negative impacts of plastic packaging alone are estimated at US$40 billion annually and expected to increase significantly if production continues to increase under a business-as-usual scenario (EMAF 2016).

To overcome these challenges would bring great benefits. Increasing the life-span of products and materials through circular-economy principles dramatically reduces the production of those items, the consumption of raw materials, and the emissions of greenhouse gases from unnecessary

production, consumption, and waste disposal processes. At least as importantly, a circular-economy approach protects and enhances human health and advances economic development while protecting the environment—sea, land, and air—locally and globally.

Spheres of Implementation

This section of the report lays out a range of solutions for implementing the principles of a circular economy to free the Middle East and North Africa’s seas from plastic pollution—in general, by improving SWM, incentivizing recycling markets, reducing plastic consumption, redesigning production processes, and reimagining business models to stimulate reuse. For this new approach to manufacturing, consumption, and disposal of plastics to work, new policies and initiatives are required in several spheres of activity:

• Improving SWM. Plastic, depending on how it is handled, can pose a significant threat to climate and environment when it reaches the waste phase of its life cycle. Because plastics continue to pollute long after their use, disposal mechanisms must be improved, as for other types of waste. • Incentivizing recycling markets. By incentivizing the development and organization of recycling markets to provide clean, high-quality materials for product manufacturing, private sector participation can be encouraged through better transparency, technology, and information. Increasing plastic recycling to mitigate environmental challenges can unlock new economic growth opportunities for plastic-producing economies in the Middle East and North Africa.

• Reducing plastic consumption. Initiatives to ban or reduce nonessential plastics such as SUPs are intended to reduce unnecessary and excessive use of materials through changes in products, processes, and behaviors in consumption patterns. • Redesigning production processes and material recirculation. New policies, technologies, and processes are necessary to ensure that products are designed and managed throughout their life cycles for reuse and continuous recycling instead of for discarding and disposal. These processes include setting and reinforcing standards to regulate waste—such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes—and improving the design and end-of-life handling of products. • Reimagining new business models. To stimulate reuse, current strategies for material recirculation face systemic challenges. By themselves, pledges to increase recycling rates, even dramatically, are unlikely to effectively address the local, national, or global environmental, human

health, economic—or climate—impacts of growing plastic production. Accompanying, or providing the context for, such pledges must be governmentally enforced incentives and corresponding disincentives applied all along the chain from plastic producers to distributors to end users.

Potential Rewards from a Circular Economy

The rise in population in recent decades, the increased exploitation of resources, and generalized open-dumping practices are the main drivers of waste management problems in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the treatment-capacity deficiency can be addressed in a way that creates new revenue streams, fully using waste as a resource. In this way, among others, the circular-economy approach presents an opportunity—and a cost-effective one—to rethink some of the region’s current waste policies. For example, GCC countries could save US$138 billion by 2030 through an integral circular-economy approach, according to a report for the 2019 World Government Summit (Anouti et al. 2019).

Another important expected outcome from the transition to a circular economy is its net beneficial effect on job creation. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of jobs linked to the circular economy in the European Union (EU) grew by 5 percent to around 4 million (EC 2020). With adequate policies and regulatory frameworks to support the development of, and transition to, new industries, governments can ensure that the circular economy creates more and better jobs, including jobs for vulnerable groups.

Notably, the circular-economy approach creates more jobs than waste management systems that primarily burn or bury waste. Recycling can create over 50 times as many jobs as landfills and incinerators, repair systems can create 200 times as many, and remanufacturing 30 times as many (Ribeiro-Broomhead and Tangri 2021). The remanufacturing sector is highly promising, because materials like baled paper and aluminum are used as feedstock for the manufacture of consumer goods. Although these calculations can vary depending on the material in question and how individual facilitates operate, the results show that recycling, repair, and reuse can create thousands of new jobs across cities of different incomes and contexts. The same study estimates that the job growth in the high-recovery-rate scenario is particularly dramatic in cities with low current recycling rates. Cities with lower collection rates could see even greater jobs gains as municipal waste services are expanded. Anywhere from 10 to 60 jobs can be created in composting, recycling, and remanufacturing for every job lost in disposal methods (Ribeiro-Broomhead and Tangri 2021).

A recent report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) about the potential of circular economy in Indonesia shows important opportunities not only for the plastics sector but also for five economic sectors that represent one-third of the country’s gross domestic product and employed more than 43 million people in 2019: food and beverages, textiles, construction, wholesale and retail trade, and electrical and electronic equipment (Bappenas and UNDP 2021). A circular-economy approach would reduce waste in each sector by 18–52 percent, reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 126 million tons and water use by 6.3 billion cubic meters, and create 4.4 million net cumulative jobs by 2030 (Bappenas and UNDP 2021). By creating new opportunities, making supply chains more resilient, and providing business opportunities—especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—a circular economy can be a key economic component in the region’s economic recovery plans.

For the Middle East and North Africa region, adopting a circulareconomy approach to the design, manufacture, use, and recycling of plastics (reduce, recycle, reuse) can help decouple plastics from fossil fuel usage, promote economic recovery in a post–COVID-19 context, and support a transition to a more sustainable development pathway. Morocco, Tunisia, and the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates are already taking steps to optimize resources and minimize waste by engaging key industry actors, understanding the sources of pollution, and identifying the locales and sectors that contribute most to the problem (as noted earlier in the “Maghreb Models for Emulation” subsection and below in the “Policies to Recycle Plastic Waste” subsection).

Experience shows that there is no single solution for managing plastic pollution of the oceans and that governments, in conjunction with the private sector and NGOs, will have to use an integrated approach with new ways to deliver the important benefits of today’s plastics. Among these efforts, the SwitchMed project aims to promote the circular economy in countries along the Mediterranean basin, supporting industry trainings, awareness programs, and legislative procedures in several of the region’s economies, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and West Bank and Gaza.12

Policies to Manage Plastic Pollution Using a Circular-Economy Approach

Economies differ in their levels of plastic pollution, sources infrastructure, and approaches to managing waste. Designing effective interventions will need to take into account each economy’s policy contexts, governance structures, economic resources, and stakeholder participation levels and will need to develop cost-benefit analyses for the options being considered.