As the world grapples with the escalating crisis of plastic pollution, nations face common global challenges. The ongoing negotiations for a legally binding treaty present a historic opportunity to address this challenge and move towards global, standardized frameworks for tracking plastic pollution. Monitoring is essential for science-based management of plastic pollution, serving as the backbone for evaluating progress and holding parties accountable. Robust, science-based systems for monitoring and reporting will be vital to ensure that measures taken as part of the implementation of the plastics instrument are mitigating the plastic pollution crisis.
This blog seeks to explore the essential elements of a monitoring framework, the gaps that need to be addressed, and how treaty efforts can align with broader sustainability goals to drive effective action against plastic pollution.
Plastic pollution is pervasive, affecting not just oceans but land, air, and ecosystems. Addressing this issue requires data on every stage of the plastic lifecycle—production, use, disposal, waste management, and environmental leakage – to ensure coordinated and effective mitigation efforts.
Evaluating the effectiveness of treaty measures requires monitoring progress in implementation, particularly in terms of environmental and human health impacts and economic sustainability. Monitoring must cover country commitments and actions, assessing the efficiency of methods and results. A transparent, “bottom-up” approach that combines national reporting with global environmental monitoring systems is key. The scientific community can play a crucial role in maintaining objectivity and credibility in monitoring efforts.
The main challenge lies in identifying what are the key elements for a coordinated approach to monitoring. Tracking plastic flows involves examining movement throughout the economy— from production, use to trade and waste management — and assessing their environmental fates, behaviour, and impacts on human and ecosystem health. Comprehensive data collection is key for identifying trends in specific plastic use and waste generation, enabling progress in reducing leakage, pollution and associated impacts. To ensure the treaty’s effectiveness, it is critical to define how plastic pollution is generated, establish indicators to measure leakage sources, and set baselines for its presence in the environment and organisms.
Monitoring must focus on two key areas:
Tracking how plastics enter the economy is crucial for understanding their flow throughout economy including production types, flow volumes, consumption patterns, recycling rates, and plastic waste trade. Such data can provide a baseline to evaluate trends in plastic use and waste generation, measure reductions in primary plastic production, and assess the transition to a safe, non-toxic circular economy. Achieving this requires public reporting and transparency from producers and others in the supply chain, as effective tracking depends on accessible and reliable data.
Key milestones to assess the impact of measures on the economy include:
The environmental impacts of plastic pollution extend far beyond visible litter. Microplastics infiltrate soil, water bodies, and even the atmosphere, while toxic chemicals leach into ecosystems, threatening environmental and human health. Monitoring these impacts is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. Assessing the bioaccumulation of toxic substances and plastic’s impact on ecosystems is vital, especially regarding soil bacteria and fungi, which affect agricultural productivity and food security.
The following indicators, among others, can help assess risks and guide mitigation efforts:
Additionally, identifying and addressing the key sources of plastic pollution is critical for targeted interventions. Relevant indicators include:
The treaty’s monitoring framework should align closely with existing international commitments to ensure coherence with global sustainability goals and enhance its overall impact.
Incorporating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) metrics such as SDG 12.5 focusing on waste reduction through recycling and reuse, and SDG 14.1 focusing on reducing marine pollution from land-based activities reductions in marine pollution, can support tracking progress while supporting the achievement of broader global targets for sustainable development.
The treaty can also address objectives of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), particularly Target 7, which addresses the need to reduce pollution risks, including those posed by plastics. Monitoring marine litter density and microplastics in water columns will provide essential data to assess and mitigate the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem health. Additionally, including plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions can ensure alignment with international climate commitments and reinforce the interconnectedness of tackling plastic pollution and mitigating climate change. Promoting collaboration with WHO, FAO and other UN bodies is essential to track health and ecosystem impacts.
Despite valuable regional and national initiatives, significant gaps remain in monitoring plastic pollution. Fragmentation is a major issue, with systems operating independently and lacking standardized methodologies, which hinders data comparability across regions and timeframes and global assessments. Additionally, monitoring often occurs in limited areas or specific times, leaving gaps in understanding how plastic pollution varies globally and seasonally.
Monitoring efforts also disproportionately focus on marine environments, leaving terrestrial and atmospheric ecosystems underexplored. Additionally, many studies and monitoring systems focus on larger debris, neglecting microplastics and nanoplastics, which have pervasive impacts on ecosystems and food chains. This imbalance creates blind spots in understanding the full extent and impacts of plastic pollution.
A key challenge in microplastic and nanoplastic monitoring is the difficulty and high cost of extracting small particles, for instance from bioindicators and catheterizing their polymers. Additionally, current technologies often lack the sensitivity and precision to measure these particles accurately, leaving critical gaps in assessing their prevalence and impact.
To overcome these challenges and establish a robust monitoring framework, the treaty should incorporate several key measures.
First, standardized protocols are needed to track plastic pollution across all environmental compartments consistently, ensuring that data collected globally is comparable and reliable.
Second, transparent, open-access data systems using public dashboards and databases can make monitoring data available to all stakeholders, enabling collaborative efforts to combat plastic pollution and empowering both policymakers and the public to drive change.
Third, a global digital hub should be established under an international body to integrate and analyse data across the plastic life cycle collected from various levels and stakeholders. This hub should leverage existing frameworks, such as the Integrated Marine Debris Observing System (IMDOS) to ensure that treaty efforts align with and build on existing frameworks, enhancing efficiency and avoiding duplication.
Fourth, local communities, particularly in remote areas, can contribute valuable grassroots data to complement scientific efforts. While challenging, effective training and standardization can help incorporate citizen science into formal monitoring systems, improving monitoring quality and coverage.
Finally, sustainable funding is critical for strengthening long-term monitoring systems and data collection. Investment in advanced technologies, such as radar-based mapping of plastic debris or sensor technologies for microplastic detection can enhance monitoring. The financial and technical cooperation mechanism under the treaty should support efforts to improve plastic pollution monitoring.
The ISC is committed to advancing a robust legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution, grounded in the latest scientific evidence. Through active collaboration with Member States, the ISC is working to ensure access to comprehensive scientific insights spanning natural and social sciences.
The ISC expert group on plastic pollution has actively coordinated policy-relevant contributions, delivering statement and written inputs, organized side events and roundtables, participated in regional workshops and worked closely with national delegations during the intersessional period leading up to INC-5.
Image by Antoine GIRET on Unsplash
Disclaimer
The information, opinions and recommendations presented in our guest blogs are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of the International Science Council
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