U.N. Considers Global Ban on Chemical Essential to Manufacture Plastics

U.N. Considers Global Ban on Chemical Essential to Manufacture Plastics

The globalist community spent years targeting the life-essential compound carbon dioxide by blaming its release from the burning of fossil fuels for “global warming.” Now they are eyeing another chemical to demonize.

The world produces over 270 million tons of plastics each year, used in nearly every aspect of life in the civilized world. The compound the globalists are targeting for the stringent new regulations is called UV-328. A lot of plastic packaging uses the substance.

These actions are considered the “beginning of the end” for plastics.

Scientists supporting a ban said it would be a ‘watershed’ moment heralding the end for plastics because the additives are an ‘essential’ component of consumer plastic products.

…The Swiss government has put forward a proposal to ban or limit UV-328 to the Stockholm Convention, the UN’s global treaty on cross-border pollutants. Documents obtained from the US Environmental Protection Agency via freedom of information requests show industry attempts to thwart any regulation.

Karissa Kovner, a senior policy adviser at the EPA, has also spoken against action at a UN meeting.

The agency told the Mail its scientists had found the chemical had not met the convention’s requirements in terms of bioaccumulation, long-range transport and adverse effects and so they believed the proposal should be put aside until further studies were completed.

But Professor Hideshige Takada, of Tokyo University, said it should be ‘strictly banned’. He added: ‘Regulation of UV-328 is the beginning of the end of plastics.’

The compound UV-328 is one of the various ultraviolet-light (UV) stabilizers used to protect products such as building materials, automotive parts, waxes, and paints from harmful UV radiation. This way, the products retain structural or color integrity. Typically, it is 0.1-1% in concentration within a plastics formulation.

Scientists suspect these chemicals are endocrine-disrupting compounds. UV-328 supposedly adversely impacts the reproductive system during tests on zebrafish. Therefore, scientists classified it as harmful to aquatic life.

If all this regulatory excess were not enough, the United Nations wants to have its first official meeting about plastics pollution in February 2022.

Other initiatives discussed at the conference include an effort to globally restrict use of a plastic additive; Canada’s proposal to ban or restrict certain single-use plastics; a European Commission proposal to tighten regulations of polymers, which are used to make plastic and other materials; and a Basel Convention amendment that, effective Jan. 1, began to control trade in plastic waste.

The proposed justification to regulate some of the chemicals under debate—including a widely used plastic additive, UV-328—could have serious ripple effects for other chemicals, speakers said.

A committee advising the Stockholm convention decided in January, that UV-328, made by BASF SE, met the convention’s criteria for possible restriction, said Martin Kayser, the company’s senior vice president of product safety.

The treaty targets chemicals that remain in the environment for years, build up in the food chain, are toxic, and circulate globally. UV-328 meets many of those criteria, but it doesn’t meet the convention’s definition of long-range, global transport, Kayser said.

Under the convention, a chemical might meet the long-range transport criteria if it moves through the air, water, or migrant species, said Karissa Kovner, a senior EPA policy adviser for international affairs. But the committee decided UV-328 is transported via marine debris, a means not discussed in the treaty and a rationale the agency has concerns about, she said.

Using a chemical’s presence in marine debris as a way to meet the treaty’s transport criteria would set a “dangerous precedent for many more chemicals,” Kayser said. And the science on UV-328 doesn’t support that conclusion, he said.

The next step is for the same committee to review the economic and societal implications of restricting UV-328.

There is at least one humorous aspect to these developments. Proponents of the plastics industry intend to fight these plans… to prevent “climate change.”

America’s Plastic Makers and value chain partners are working to build a more sustainable and circular economy that ends plastic waste and addresses climate change.

We’ve set a goal to reuse, recycle or recover all plastic packaging in the U.S. by 2040, and we look forward to collaborating on workable, constructive solutions, such as by developing a national recycling strategy to standardize and expand local programs, supporting development of recycling education and infrastructure through material-neutral packaging fees, accelerating advanced recycling, and developing recycled content goals for packaging and products.

If these plans go forward as proposed, I predict China will manufacture all plastic in the not too distant future. But given how the UN has acted during the COVID-19 pandemic, it could be argued that this development would be a feature and not a bug.

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