The UNEP Plastics Initiative is driven by a bold and transformative vision: to end global plastic pollution. This long-term goal requires a fundamental shift in how we produce, use, and manage plastics, moving away from the current linear model of “take-make-dispose” to a circular system where plastic products are designed to be reused, recycled, and repurposed.
To bring this vision to life, the UNEP Plastics Initiative aims to create an enabling and empowering environment that accelerates market transformation. Central to this effort is the promotion of upstream innovation and solutions that focus on reducing plastic production and increasing reuse, rather than relying solely on recycling.
Strategic goals
The Initiative’s strategy is rooted in four key goals, designed to address plastic pollution comprehensively:
- GOAL 1: Reduce the size of the problem - Eliminating and substituting unnecessary or problematic plastics and hazardous additives, accelerating the market for reusable products, and increasing the use of recycled plastics.
- GOAL 2: Design for circularity - Ensuring products are designed to be circular (toxic-free, less resource-intensive, reusable, recyclable, and compostable), for both plastics and alternatives.
- GOAL 3: Ensure circularity in practice - Closing the loop of plastic in the economy by ensuring plastic products are circulated in practice (reused, recycled, and composted).
- GOAL 4: Deal with legacy - Managing plastic waste that cannot be reused or recycled in an environmentally sound manner.
Targets
The Initiative works with a wide range of partners and stakeholders to achieve the following targets by 2027:
- TARGET 1: 45 Countries will have improved their plastics policies and regulations to enable robust transition towards a just and safe circular economy of plastics.
- TARGET 2: 500 Private sector actors in key industry sectors will have adopted effective circular solutions and innovations, committed to circular economy to reduce plastic pollution.
- TARGET 3: 50 Financial Institutions will have included circularity or plastic pollution prevention and reduction policies in their sustainability strategy and/or targets.
Approach
The UNEP Plastics Initiative adopts a programmatic approach, delivering projects at global, regional, and national levels across high-impact sectors and value chains. This approach ensures that efforts are tailored to specific contexts while contributing to the overall goal of reducing plastic pollution.
- Global projects that focus on providing technical assistance, conducting scientific assessments, developing harmonized methodologies, guiding national action plans, mobilising finance, and enhancing monitoring, reporting, communication, partnerships, and capacity building.
- Regional projects that focus on creating an enabling environment for replication and upscaling, promoting engagement, and fostering peer-to-peer learning and capacity building across regions.
- National & sub-national projects that focus on policy implementation and enforcement, industrial innovation, technology application, infrastructure development, and stakeholder engagement at the country and local levels.
Intervention Areas
The Initiative is active in the following intervention areas that are crucial for achieving a circular economy for plastics:
- Industry - Guiding and supporting industry action: Support companies and businesses to develop and upscale effective, innovative, and sustainable new business models and alternative product design towards a circular plastic economy.
- Regulation and policy development - Enabling national and local regulatory frameworks: Support and engage national and local governments to develop and implement integrated policies and enabling regulations across the plastic life cycle that promote circularity.
- Enabling and planning - Enabling coordinated and concerted actions: Support the development and implementation of coordinated and concerted action among all stakeholders, by developing harmonised methodologies and conducting scientific assessments to better understand the plastics issue.
- Finance - Supporting finance action: Support the development and implementation of public and private finance to create an enabling finance environment for the uptake of circular products, policies, innovation, technologies, solutions, and infrastructure.
- Communication and campaigns - Activating behaviour change and social action: Develop and disseminate communication and awareness-raising campaigns, and support capacity development and engagement strategies to shift industry and government practices, change social norms and end-consumer behaviour towards plastics circularity.
- Knowledge management and capacity development - Supporting capacity development and informed decisions: Support capacities of governments and businesses, as well as UN Country Teams, and increase their capacity to apply relevant knowledge products and harmonised approaches towards plastics circularity.
More Information
For more information about the UNEP Plastics Initiative and its efforts to combat global plastic pollution through a circular economy approach, please reach out to us at unep-plastics-initiative@un.org or explore our brochure here.
Sign up for the UNEP Plastics Initiative Newsletter here to receive updates on our work, events, and ways you can get involved.
