SOUTH Korea has been in the limelight for most of last week, but unfortunately, Guyanese who rely on local media outlets for their daily intake of news might have only heard about one of three very important events.

The least important bit of news from a country 13 hours ahead of us is the one that got a small amount of local coverage. Just a few days ago, we learned that South Korea signed an Air Service Agreement with Guyana to promote and facilitate travel between the two countries.

Hardly anyone I know is talking about this and perhaps for good reasons that have to do with the second bit of South Korean news. President Yoon Suk Yeol stunned his nation and the international community when he suspended civilian rule last Tuesday night. He was eventually forced to reverse course after lawmakers threatened to impeach him. Yoon apologised but refused to quit.

Still, opposition parties introduced a motion to impeach him. That vote was held yesterday as more than 150,000 protested outside the National Assembly in Seoul. Yoon survived because his party’s lawmakers walked out of the assembly.

Yoon’s failed attempt to impose martial law eclipsed the third and most important news coming out of South Korea this last week. A stone’s throw from the stunning beaches and bustling markets of Busan, on the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, with the Yellow Sea to the south and the Sea of Japan to the east, 3,300 participants from over 170 countries were gathered at the
UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) on Plastic Pollution.

Mandated by a 2022 UN Environment Assembly resolution, the treaty negotiations sought to address the full life cycle of plastic — production, design and disposal — through an international, legally binding instrument.

More than 100 nations that sent representatives at the fifth and final UN meeting wanted to cap production, but unfortunately, the meeting broke up without a legally binding global treaty to curb plastic pollution.

Big Oil, such as ExxonMobil, wanted the focus to be on managing plastic waste. Participants accused China, the United States, India, South Korea and Saudi Arabia – the top five primary polymer-producing nations, of derailing negotiations to cap plastic production, valued at $100-billion. Had an agreement been reached, the treaty would have been one of the most significant deals relating to environmental protection since the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The failure to reach a deal in Busan came days after the turbulent conclusion of the COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. In Baku, countries set a new global target to mobilise $300B annually in climate finance, an amount that small island states deemed to be an insult.

Without limits on production, plastic is expected to triple by 2060. Microplastics are now in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and our soil and more alarming, it is now showing up in our bodies and even in human breast milk, signalling untold consequences for human health and reproduction.

According to the 2023 UN Environment Programme report, women and children are susceptible to more than 3,200 chemicals found in plastics. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastics is dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes. According to some estimates, 10 million tons of plastic end up in the sea every year. Can you just imagine 199 million tons of plastic bobbing around the world’s oceans? In weight, that’s equivalent to nearly a million blue whales.

Fossil-fuel producers argue that plastic pollution is a result of poor waste management. But it ignores the fact that plastics are hard to break down and after decades of smart waste management, only nine per cent of global plastic is being recycled. And according to the United Nations Environment Programme, 12 percent is being incinerated; the rest is either still in use, in landfills or polluting the environment.

A few months ago, the Protected Area Commission and the Policy Forum Guyana hosted the “Waste to Win” competition. Fifty-four participants from 17 schools were awarded prizes; good for them to participate. The 27 teams that focused on plastic waste collected 28,321 plastic bottles. Why does it take students to clean up our waste? Shame on us.

According to a recent study by Utility Bidder, Guyana is a major contributor to plastic pollution. We are ranked sixth with 35.20 kilogrammes of plastic waste per person, much of it ending up in the Atlantic Ocean. Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that Guyanese produce 0.77 kilogrammes of solid waste per person per day.
Notwithstanding some of the amazing initiatives that are already in place, every one of us has to do much more to curb the convenience that comes with single-use plastic products. We can start by refusing to drink our water from plastic bottles.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.