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Plastic treaty blocked: how you can tackle plastic pollution yourself
The abolition of slavery took almost a hundred years in the Netherlands. A hundred years! While international slave trade was abolished as early as 1815 under pressure from the British government, it took until 1914 for the last slave on the Dutch East Indian peninsula of Samosir to gain his freedom. The lesson: systemic change takes time. A lot of time!
In the spring of 2022, the United Nations decided that global agreements on plastic were needed. A special commission was set up, a draft was drawn up, and meetings were held. But after six meetings spread over three years, it became clear that reaching an agreement—with unanimous consent—was not feasible [1].
What can we do?
At the political level, people prefer to remain on friendly terms rather than challenge each other. It therefore seems that, as in the past, real systemic change will have to come from the bottom up. From the power of the collective. If we as consumers change course, politicians will ultimately have to follow suit. Let's therefore encourage each other en masse to achieve the following seven checkmarks:
- Go on a plastic diet for a week: buy your groceries directly from the farmer or a natural supermarket and only buy products that are not packaged in plastic;
- Make a list of all the plastic products you can find at home. Tip: watch the animation made by the NOS [3];
- Sign our petition for a plastic treaty so we can continue our mission.
- Download the PlasticFreeFuture app for Android or iPhone and scan your cosmetics for the presence of nano- and microplastics.
- Choose plastic alternatives: replace plastic wrap with a beeswax cloth, choose glass or stainless steel lunch boxes and drinking cups, and replace your shampoo bottle with a bar of soap.
- Spend a day picking up litter to become aware of how much waste is littering the streets.
- Share this challenge with your friends and family so that together we can reduce the mountain of plastic waste.
Has the activist fire been ignited in you too, and are you tired of watching our world become increasingly buried in plastic? Then sign up for our newsletter and raise money for PSF so that we can continue our mission. Because only together can we bring about systemic change.
Rynaldo Koerhuis (1995) advises, sells, and writes. He writes a blog about a current topic twice a month for the Plastic Soup Foundation.
[1] Plastic Soup Foundation, ‘Plasticverdrag: onderhandelingen in Genève zonder akkoord’, 19t h of august 2025.
[2] Plastic Soup Foundation, ‘Life is plastic’, 30th of april 2024.
[3] NOS, ‘Hoe olielobbyisten hun stempel drukken op een plasticakkoord’.
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