European Plastics Strategy: What promise for global marine litter?

Abstract

This note explores the EU's Plastics Strategy as a policy document by considering its implications for the environment, with a particular focus on marine ecosystems. The strategy anticipates a set of concrete, mostly regulatory, measures across multiple economic sectors. By shifting from a linear model, with its constant leakages of waste into natural systems, to the circular one, the EU demonstrates a decisive ambition in changing the course of the plastics treatment around the world and addressing global marine litter. Despite being an EU internal document, the strategy is likely to stimulate more rigorous approaches of individual countries, influence the global policy processes that address marine litter and create a transformation across supply chains. The challenge in the circular model is to not divert from the legal commitment to the waste hierarchy.