Alliance to End Plastic Waste

So here's Rob talking about the various coalitions which exist around lobbying for the UN plastic treaty negotiations.

So on one hand you have the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and it's essentially a petrochemical-led initiative, and it was created by the American Chemistry Council, the lead trades body for petrochemical companies in the US, and it was in response to growing concern around public attention to the marine pollution crisis around 2017 and 2018.

So you had essentially the brief that was given to Weber Shandwick, which was the public relations agency charged with developing the branding for the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, was to change the conversation away from simplistic bans of plastic to real long-term solutions to managing plastic waste.

That was the brief that they were given, and I think sort of captures the purpose of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which is really to try to shift the attention away from the production of plastics towards waste management.

This partnership committed a billion in US dollars to trying to address the plastic pollution crisis.

Up till this point, they've actually allocated very little of that budget.

It's somewhere between 150 to 200 million over the past five years.

So in terms of the claims made when the partnership was formed, it's actually very kind of at odds with the actual distribution of grants.