Sustainable Plastics - January/February 2023 - 4

reflection
KC Crain, CEO
Chris Taylor, vice president and general manager,
Global Polymer Group
editorial
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Sustainability
requires global
partnership
S
ustainability Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, COP, scopes, net zero, decarbonisation,
greenwashing, circularity - the past decade or so has brought forth
a whole new vocabulary to talk about sustainability. It is a vocabulary that many
people are still struggling to master while trying to comprehend what it's all about.
It's understandable. The problem is both vast and daunting - climate change! social
inequality! marine pollution! - making it hard to grasp its full extent. On a positive note,
the willingness of the general public to make more sustainable choices has increased
strongly over the past five years, although it must be said that people's knowledge of the
sustainability issues in the world continues to be startlingly patchy.
Even the current willingness has also been slow in developing. Sustainability was first
defined in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, a commission appointed in 1983 by the
United Nations to study how to achieve economic development for the countries of the
world without sacrificing ecological health and social equity. It came up with the now-wellknown
definition of sustainable development as 'development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.
That definition works perfectly, embracing as it does the very holistic nature of the concept
and acknowledging the interplay of the ecological, social and economic dimensions.
After all, like us, next to natural resources, future generations will also need social and
economic ones in order to prosper.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member
states in 2015 and featuring the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, is in essence
a global partnership created to establish a path to a sustainable future for the world.
They are, in other words, universal goals.
But can developing countries and developed countries share the same goals? Yes,
says the UN. But diff erent countries can take diff erent actions and contribute in diff erent
ways to achieving global sustainability. For example, a population living in poverty
is going to be more concerned about survival than plastics recycling, which means a
country may need to improve general living conditions as a first sustainability step;
richer countries, which may feel they have more to lose, must abandon their wasteful
economies and polluting practices for more sustainable consumption and production
patterns. It's a two-way eff ort.
In this issue, we've included articles on two countries - Malaysia and Brazil - both
of which are grappling with the implementation of the sustainability goals and the implications
these have for the plastics industry in the two countries. Eager for international
trade and export, the industries realise the need to comply with international sustainability
standards and quality requirements. Both are finding ways that fit with their circumstances
and cultures to achieve this.
Because opting out is no longer an option - for anyone - sustainability is a global
partnership, and we are all in it together.
Karen Laird
Editor
4
January/February 2023
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Sustainable Plastics - January/February 2023

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