Headlines in December 2024 proclaimed the “collapse” and “failure” of United Nations plastics treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea. This is, however, an overly simplistic and pessimistic portrayal. Progress on less contentious issues was made, and the meeting was adjourned with a commitment to continue negotiating in 2025 on the basis of the “Chair’s text.” Significantly, at the closing plenary, a majority of states voiced support for a “high-ambition” treaty covering the full life cycle of plastics, drawing clear red lines on the necessity of legally binding measures to phase out hazardous plastics, regulate chemicals in plastics, and finance just transitions. Delegates from developing countries such as Rwanda, Panama, and Mexico were especially steadfast in demanding an “ambitious” treaty to end plastic pollution, including in marine ecosystems. Yet there were also setbacks, as multiple, intersecting axes of pro-plastics power – comprising loose alliances of petrostates and business interests profiting from rising plastics production – sought to thwart high-ambition obligations. Industry actors lobbied against stringent commitments and endeavored to narrow the treaty’s scope to downstream waste management. Petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, stalled discussions and bracketed high-ambition text. Divisions between developing and developed countries also emerged over the appropriate financing mechanism. Despite this turbulence, achieving a strong treaty remains possible. But this will require strengthening the high-ambition axis of power, enhancing transparency and accountability, and ensuring the meaningful inclusion of rights holders, local communities, and civil society.

Brand names can be used to hold plastic companies accountable for their items found polluting the environment. We used data from a 5-year (2018–2022) worldwide (84 countries) program to identify brands found on plastic items in the environment through 1576 audit events. We found that 50% of items were unbranded, calling for mandated producer reporting. The top five brands globally were The Coca-Cola Company (11%), PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%), and Altria (2%), accounting for 24% of the total branded count, and 56 companies accounted for more than 50%. There was a clear and strong log-log linear relationship production (%) = pollution (%) between companies’ annual production of plastic and their branded plastic pollution, with food and beverage companies being disproportionately large polluters. Phasing out single-use and short-lived plastic products by the largest polluters would greatly reduce global plastic pollution.

The ongoing international negotiations on a global plastics treaty will have pivotal implications for future efforts to transform the plastic economy. This is essential since the current use of plastic in the economy impacts the environment beyond the planetary carrying capacity. To ensure that the forthcoming Treaty can provide the foundation for this transition, the best available science must be made available in the negotiations, but with no formal scientific mechanism to inform the negotiations process, this is not ensured. The Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastic Treaty serves as an example of how the global scientific community has self-organized and come together to address this task, working with five different categories of science-policy communication. The Scientists' Coalition's work is made transparent here with the hope that it can inspire organization of scientific input into other future policy areas.

Plastics are an international governance priority because of extensive and resource-intensive production, uncontrolled environmental releases, and failure to control the chemicals within the materials. We examine the evidence that plastics have exceeded the planetary safe operating space, discussing how plastics pollution affects multiple Earth system processes along the impact pathway from resource extraction and production to release to environmental fate and impacts. Multiple lines of evidence capture the complex reality of these novel entities; a single planetary boundary quantification would be detrimental. We demonstrate causal links between plastics and other environmental problems, exacerbating the consequences of breaching other planetary boundaries. We propose biophysically defined control variables for the planetary boundaries framework as a way to measure, monitor, and mitigate global plastics pollution. We call for urgent action, recognizing plastics pollution not only as a waste management problem but as an integrative part of climate change, biodiversity, and natural-resource-use policy.

As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need, we used previously published and new data on floating ocean plastics (n = 11,777 stations) to create a global time-series that estimates the average counts and mass of small plastics in the ocean surface layer from 1979 to 2019. Today’s global abundance is estimated at approximately 82–358 trillion plastic particles weighing 1.1–4.9 million tonnes. We observed no clear detectable trend until 1990, a fluctuating but stagnant trend from then until 2005, and a rapid increase until the present. This observed acceleration of plastic densities in the world’s oceans, also reported for beaches around the globe, demands urgent international policy interventions.

Academia has experienced acceleration and expansion in parallel with the Great Acceleration, which has shaped the Anthropocene. Among other pressures, the expectation to be internationally mobile conflicts with many values held by sustainability scholars and results in disillusionment. The changes in the academic system can be seen through the framework of the adaptive cycle, which can help us understand historical parallels and shape the system to better align with sustainability values in future. We hope this piece can contribute to the discussion of the next steps forward to reimagine academia.

Plastic removal technologies can temporarily mitigate plastic accumulation at local scales, but evidence-based criteria are needed in policies to ensure that they are feasible and that ecological benefits outweigh the costs. To reduce plastic pollution efficiently and economically, policy should prioritize regulating and reducing upstream production rather than downstream pollution cleanup.

We submit that the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring. The novel entities boundary in the planetary boundaries framework refers to entities that are novel in a geological sense and that could have large-scale impacts that threaten the integrity of Earth system processes. We review the scientific literature relevant to quantifying the boundary for novel entities and highlight plastic pollution as a particular aspect of high concern. An impact pathway from production of novel entities to impacts on Earth system processes is presented. We define and apply three criteria for assessment of the suitability of control variables for the boundary: feasibility, relevance, and comprehensiveness. We propose several complementary control variables to capture the complexity of this boundary, while acknowledging major data limitations. We conclude that humanity is currently operating outside the planetary boundary based on the weight-of-evidence for several of these control variables. The increasing rate of production and releases of larger volumes and higher numbers of novel entities with diverse risk potentials exceed societies’ ability to conduct safety related assessments and monitoring. We recommend taking urgent action to reduce the harm associated with exceeding the boundary by reducing the production and releases of novel entities, noting that even so, the persistence of many novel entities and/or their associated effects will continue to pose a threat.