WWF Position: Biobased and Biodegradable Plastic
Global plastic pollution is an increasingly urgent environmental crisis, and one which has amassed significant public attention in recent years. Plastic pollution threatens aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems around the world. An estimated 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year. Plastic pollution has been found in even the most remote environments, it takeshundreds or even thousands of years to degrade in nature, and it affects wildlife through entanglement, ingestion, and habitat impacts. The plastic pollution crisis is the result of a multitude of factors including a broken material management system that cannot adequately recover the material entering the system, the underlying “take-make-dispose" model of the economy, and prolonged patterns of overproduction. Both the production of plastic and plastic pollution affect many WWF goals including climate, oceans, wildlife, and freshwater (WWF Description).