A national online recycling directory for plastic bags and films has been taken offline, six months after an investigation by ABC News found some materials were ending up in landfills, incinerators and other waste facilities.

The directory previously directed users to some 18,000 store drop-off locations around the country where they could bring used plastic bags and packaging to be recycled, including Walmart and Target locations. The initiative was promoted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and local and state governments across the country.

In May, ABC News and affiliates used digital tracking devices to monitor plastic waste dropped off at Walmart and Target stores listed on the directory. Of the 46 trackers placed, the vast majority never ended up at locations associated with plastic bag recycling.

“Plastic film recycling had been an abysmal failure for decades and it’s important that plastic companies stop lying to the public,” said Judith Enck, president of advocacy group Beyond Plastics. “Finally, the truth is coming out.”

Plastics are a major contributor to the climate crisis. Made from oil and gas, the materials are set to drive nearly half of oil demand growth by midcentury, according to the US International Energy Agency.

Producing the materials requires fossil fuel extraction, refining and “cracking” in special high-heat facilities, and plastic waste often ends up in landfills and waste incinerators. Each step produces planet-heating and toxic emissions.

Already, the production and disposal of plastics account for 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says, and that number is slated to rise.

Nina Bellucci Butler, CEO of Stina Inc, which managed the directory, cited a serious lack of commitment from industry partners in the decision to shutter the initiative, as well as meager demand for recycled plastics.

“It’s a fine line between maintaining a credible resource to help people find the best option for the common household items that are not easy to eliminate … and enabling greenwashing,” she wrote in an email.

She said a lack of adequate funding for the project and the plastic recycling sector at large also contributed to the decision to take down the site. The project was initially funded by the American Chemistry Council, a plastic industry lobbying group which has lobbied against many US environmental regulations, but Butler said it had been self-funded for almost a year before closing down last month.

The directory’s demise is indicative of a larger problem in the plastics recycling sector. Of the 51m tons of plastic waste US households generated in 2021, just 2.4m tons – or 5% – was recycled, a Greenpeace report found last year.

A major hurdle: plastic materials are expensive to collect and sort. There are thousands of different kinds of the material, and none of them can be melted down together. Even plastics of the same category often can’t be recycled together – bottles that are dyed green or blue, for instance, can’t be processed with clear bottles made of the same kind of plastic, and few facilities have the capacity to sort so many different materials, the Greenpeace report found.

Industry interests have long insisted that plastic recycling can be improved, yet report after report shows recycling is failing to rein in the problem.

Plastic waste is also a major contributor to terrestrial and marine pollution, and can leach toxins into the environment.

Experts say plastic production must be curbed in an effort to curb toxic and planet-heating pollution. And Enck, who is also a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, said rather than relying on plastic recycling programs, “it’s better for people to shift to reusable bags”.

Butler said Stina also encourages the public to recycle plastic goods with the Trex Company, which still runs a recycling program with retailers. But ultimately, she said, she hopes the decision to end the program “results in more support for recyclers”.

“It’s past time to rethink business as usual,” she said.

Last month, world leaders met in Kenya to negotiate plans to tackle the plastic pollution crisis. And at the international climate talks known as Cop28 in the UAE this week, Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations environment program, urged nations and plastic producers to change their behavior.

“The world is ready to break its addiction to both fossil fuels and plastics,” she said.

Unilever is on track to sell 53bn non-reusable sachets containing anything from sauces to shampoo in 2023, breaking its commitment to switch away from single-use plastic, a report from Greenpeace has found.

The global consumer goods group has committed to reducing its plastic footprint and has said it wants to create a “waste-free world”. Under its former chief executive Paul Polman, who stepped down in 2019, Unilever positioned itself as a global leader on sustainability.

Four years ago, the company’s outgoing head of nutrition, Hanneke Faber, described the type of multilayer plastic found in sachets as “evil” because it could not be recycled.

However, research by the environment NGO Greenpeace has found that despite Unilever’s pledge to halve its use of virgin plastic by 2025, the company is on track to miss the target by nearly a decade.

Nina Schrank, the head of plastics at Greenpeace UK, said: “Unilever really are pouring fuel on the fire of the plastic pollution crisis. Their brands like Dove are famous for telling the world they’re forces for good. But they’re pumping out a staggering amount of plastic waste. It’s poisoning our planet. You can’t claim to be a ‘purposeful’ company whilst bearing responsibility for such huge pollution. Unilever has to change.”

The throwaway sachets of consumer products such as condiments, beauty and health products are marketed and sold in large quantities to the global south. Unilever says this is because “in several of our markets, plastic sachets allow low-income consumers an opportunity to buy small amounts of products – often ones that provide hygiene or nutrition benefits like shampoo, toothpaste and food – which they would otherwise not be able to afford”. The sachets, however, are also linked to pollution on land and in waterways, resulting in, for example, clogged drains, worsened flooding and threats to wildlife.

Sachets produced by the Unilever brand Dove have been found polluting beaches and other waterways in the Philippines and Indonesia. Dove produced an estimated 6.4bn sachets in 2022.

Greenpeace is urging Unilever to phase out single-use plastic in the next decade and begin by stopping the use of sachets. Greenpeace is also calling on Unilever to back a global plastics treaty the NGO says must include a legally binding target of cutting plastic production by at least 75% by 2040, based on a 2019 baseline, followed by a phase-down in the production.

Marian Ledesma, a campaigner at Greenpeace Philippines, said: “Each one of the many Dove sachets we found polluting beaches and waterways should be a badge of shame for Dove and Unilever. They can’t continue to flood countries like the Philippines with waste they know can be devastating … Each sachet represents the enormous health risks, environmental degradation, social injustices and climate impacts caused by plastic production and the plastic life cycle.

“If Unilever want to be seen as a leader, they should stop being part of the problem. They have to show they’re serious and commit to phasing out single-use plastic, starting with sachets. And as treaty talks continue they must turn their influence on the world stage towards helping push for this level of ambition to sit at the heart of a strong global plastics treaty.”

A Unilever spokesperson said that tackling plastic pollution is a top priority for the company which is still making progress across all its plastic goals. The company is a member of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which is campaigning for an ambitious, legally binding UN plastic treaty. “In the past few years, we have rapidly increased our use of recycled plastic (PCR) in our global portfolio to 21%. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation recently called out Unilever as one of the businesses making the most progress to reduce its virgin plastic packaging footprint.

“We’re working on a range of solutions to reduce our use of plastic sachets, which are difficult to recycle, and replace them with alternatives. This is a complex technical challenge, with no quick fixes, and we are fully committed to working with industry partners and other stakeholders to develop viable, scalable alternatives that reduce plastic waste.”

Air, water, soil, food and even blood – microplastics have found their way virtually everywhere on Earth, and now that list includes clouds.

Bits of plastic particles were recently discovered above eastern China, with new research showing that these microplastics could influence cloud formation and the weather.

A group of scientists from Shandong University in China collected cloud water atop Mount Tai, finding microplastics in 24 out of 28 samples. They include polyethylene terephthalate (otherwise known as PET), polypropylene, polyethylene and polystyrene, all particles commonly found in synthetic fibers, clothing and textiles, as well as packaging and face masks.

“This finding provides significant evidence of the presence of abundant MP’s [microplastics] in clouds,” the researchers stated in the paper published today in Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

Earlier this year, a study out of Japan showed that microplastics were present at the peak of Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama, suggesting that the particles may have originated from plastics in the ocean and been transported via air masses. The concentration of microplastics in Mount Tai cloud water was up to 70 times that of Japan’s mountains’ cloud water.

“Most pollution we tend to think of is in liquid form,” said Fay Couceiro, a professor of environmental pollution at the University of Portsmouth. “We tend to think of that going into the river and the sea. Whereas microplastics, because they are a physical particle, are not following the normal rules. We’re finding microplastics in these pristine environments at the tops of these extremely hard-to-reach mountains.”

So, how are they getting there?

Other than contamination from people visiting these sites, the particles may be transported through the air. Samples from low-altitude and denser clouds had larger amounts of microplastics in them.

Aged plastics – in other words, ones that have already been weathered from ultraviolet radiation – were smaller in size and had rougher surfaces. They also contained more lead, mercury and oxygen compared to pristine, untouched plastics. Scientists found that clouds can modify microplastics, possibly resulting in these particles affecting cloud formation.

“Cloud formation has a huge implication for not just our local weather patterns, but for our global temperatures,” said Couceiro, who was not involved in the study.

Clouds affect the climate in a plethora of ways. They produce precipitation and snow, affecting global rainfall and vegetation. Clouds block sunlight, cooling the surface of the planet and providing shade on the ground. But they can also trap heat and humidity, subsequently warming the air.

The study authors state that more research is needed to fully determine the impact of microplastics on the weather, but what remains clear is that more can be done to address this.

“There’s only one group of animals on this planet that use plastic, and that’s us human beings,” said Couceiro. “We really need a global response to this, as it’s not going to be solved by a single country, because air doesn’t respect boundaries.”

In September 1993, during a beach clean on the Isle of Man, Richard Thompson noticed thousands of multicoloured fragments at his feet, looking like sand. While his colleagues filled sacks with crisp packets, fishing rope, plastic bags and bottles, Thompson became transfixed by the particles.

They were so tiny that they did not fit any category in the spreadsheet where volunteers recorded their findings. “Yet it was pretty clear to me that the most abundant item on the beach was the smallest stuff,” Thompson says.

Over the next 10 years, after completing a PhD and going on to teach marine biology at Newcastle, Southampton and Plymouth universities, Prof Thompson spent his spare time beach-hopping, often enlisting students to help him gather dozens of sand samples in tinfoil trays.

Back in the lab, they would confirm what Thompson had first suspected: the particles were all pieces of plastic, no larger than grains of sand, and ubiquitous along the UK coastline. It was pollution on a whole new scale.

“I started studying marine biology because it was going to be all about turtles, dolphins, and coral reefs,” he says. Instead, those minuscule particles became his main fascination.

In a short study in 2004, co-authored with Prof Andrea Russell at Southampton University, Thompson first described the particles as “microplastics”. He hypothesised that as plastic entered the sea, it slowly fragmented into small but persistent pieces that spread even farther afield. He did not expect much reaction from his modest one-page article.

“It had been a May bank holiday weekend, and we’d been away camping. I came back in and every email that morning was from a journalist, and the phone was ringing continuously.”

The story was picked up instantly by networks in the UK, Europe and Asia. “Shortly after it was published, it was being discussed in the Canadian parliament,” says Russell, whose experiments had confirmed that the particles were plastic.

The discovery helped spawn an entire field of microplastics research, and would be instrumental in plastic bag taxes and bans on plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics in countries including the US, New Zealand and Canada.

Researchers now look at even tinier fragments called nanoplastics that infiltrate our blood, wombs and breastmilk. In some parts of the world, people consume a credit card’s worth of plastic this way each week.

As for Thompson, he would go on to be named the “godfather of microplastics” by a British politician, establish the International Marine Litter Research Unit at Plymouth and become a frequent guest at the House of Commons to discuss the dangers of marine litter.

Most recently, he has been catapulted into the heart of international negotiations to draw up a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, which had its most recent talks in Paris in June.

A UN-led plastics treaty is a “once-in-a-planet opportunity”, Thompson says, but on some of the supposed solutions being put forth, he is very clear. He is adamant that biodegradable plastic cannot save us. Neither can any amount of “cleanups”, like his own fateful expedition in 1993.

What’s worse, he thinks, is that if the plastics treaty sends the world chasing the wrong ideas, microplastics pollution will only worsen. “There’s a real risk that worries me,” he says. “That if we guess at this, we’ll get it wrong.”

A tall figure who speaks with an infectious enthusiasm despite the subject of his work, Thompson often starts conversations by checking his watch – knowing that once he gets started on plastics, time can quickly run away.

He describes his discovery as the result of a solution gone awry. Plastic was invented as a sustainable alternative to ivory, then became indispensable in fields such as engineering and medicine.

But the problem began in the 1950s when the industry’s ambitions turned to single-use packaging, which now accounts for 40% of the more than 400m tonnes of plastic produced each year – at least 8m tonnes of which finds its way to the ocean. Meanwhile, production is only increasing.

The other side to this coin is plastic’s persistence in nature. Thompson’s hypothesis was correct: microplastics result from the lengthy breakdown of larger items, and they will linger for decades more thanks to plastic’s inherent durability, all the while absorbing harmful toxins and pathogens that end up in the bodies of marine animals.

It was known that plastic waste floated in the ocean, but it was not until Thompson gave the tiny versions a name that the world finally recognised the scale of this new pollution.

“I saw [Thompson’s 2004] paper and said: ‘This is really important. Maybe people are going to wake up to the widespread abundance of plastics in the ocean,’” says Edward Carpenter, a retired marine scientist who was the first to describe floating plastic fragments on the surface of the Sargasso Sea in 1972 – particles that are probably still at sea to this day.

Thompson went on to provide the first evidence that sea creatures ingest these particles. He also showed their global distribution, including in the Arctic and in every sample of sand taken from dozens of beaches worldwide.

The plastics treaty would be a shot at stemming this flow, he notes. Much depends on the treaty’s scope, on questions such as whether it should ban some types of plastic, or regulate the array of 13,000 chemicals in everyday packaging.

What concerns Thompson is that policymakers may be led astray by much-hyped approaches that are already being used – for instance, hi-tech initiatives to remove plastic from the sea, such as the Ocean Cleanup.

Thompson stresses that he is an ardent believer in cleanups for coastal pollution, but that it is “naive to expect that [cleanups] can be a systemic solution” to the vast threat of microplastics.

“The psychologists would call it ‘techno-optimism’,” he says. “If we’re not careful, the public gets convinced that a big gadget whizzing around in the middle of the Pacific gyre is going to mop it all up for us, and that’s the end of the story.

“It’s an attractive story – from the point of view of not having to change anything we do.”

Similarly, the proliferation of plastic alternatives such as biodegradable and bio-based plastics. “I was really curious, was this going to be an answer to the problem?” Thompson says.

But, although they are a partial improvement on the fossil-fuel footprint of conventional plastics, and may have some legitimate uses, most biodegradable plastics do not melt away into nature – a fact Thompson first realised when, early in his research career, a trawl hauled a bag up from the bottom of the North Sea. On its side was printed “biodegradable”. “I’ve still got it here somewhere!” he says, gesturing behind him at stacked shelves loaded with folders.

We now know – again, thanks to experiments by Thompson and colleagues – that many biodegradables need controlled industrial conditions to degrade, and can take years to disappear in soil and sea.

“If we keep the nearly 300-400m tonnes of plastic we’re making every year, and all we’re doing is chucking biosource plastics [which are biodegradable] to fill the gap, it doesn’t fix the problem of litter, it doesn’t fix the problem of waste, it doesn’t fix the problem of chemicals,” he says. “It’s just substituting the carbon source.”

None of these kinds of actions change what he thinks is the real danger: the linear relationship we have with plastic – produce, consume, dispose – which created the problem. After two decades describing that problem, he is now focused on the cause. “It’s very much coming back to the land, my research, because the problem isn’t made in the ocean: it’s made by practices on land.”

He said as much at the Paris talks. “Let’s turn to the solutions, which lie upstream,” he told an audience of delegates from 58 countries, explaining that in order to slow the flowing river of plastic, we first need to narrow its source. “We can’t carry on [producing] at the rate we are. It’s overwhelming any ability to cope with it.”

He agrees with new calls among treaty negotiators to curb “unnecessary, avoidable or problematic” plastics, which could include the deluge of single-use items. “I mean, surely we want to buy the product, not the packaging it’s in,” Thompson says. “I think that’s a key place to start: the most important [type of plastic] accumulating in the oceans and escaping waste-management systems is packaging.”

But while items sheathed in Russian-doll-like layers of plastic are obvious candidates for cuts, certain plastics do bring legitimate value to our lives and are likely to remain with us, Thompson says. “I’m not saying we can carry on with business as usual. Reduce has to be the first action,” he stresses – but for the plastic that remains in use, he believes the challenge is to redesign it.

Just 10% of plastic is recycled globally, a staggeringly low figure that is partly due to the thousands of chemicals that give plastic its diverse qualities, colours and forms and make it almost impossible to remix.

“We do a really bad job of designing stuff for circularity. So when people say that it’s clearly failed because we’re only recycling 10%, I think the root cause of the error is at the design stage,” Thompson says.

“When I talk to product designers, they say they were asked to design a product that was attractive – they weren’t asked to consider end-of-life.”

Like some other scientists, he believes chemical additives need to be reduced in the plastic manufacturing process, with the bonus of making them safer to use. He cites PET bottles as a good example of how simpler construction makes it possible to recycle some products up to 10 times.

Redesign can also soften the impact of plastic during its lifecycle. Take the problem of polymer-rich fabrics that shed plastic microfibres into the sea. Several countries now require filters on washing machines to capture these threads.

Yet Thompson and his team have found that half the shedding happens, not during washing, but while people are wearing clothes. Redesigning fabric for longer wear reduces shedding by a striking 80%. “So the systemic answer would work for the planet,” he says. His latest work is examining other design challenges such as car tyres, a primary source of marine microplastics.

Growing scientific consensus on these and other issues could soon be crucial in guiding nations towards solutions, so as a scientist, Thompson is frustrated that there is no UN-level mechanism to communicate the most up-to-date plastics research to governments.

In its absence, he helped establish the Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, an independent, voluntary group of 200 multidisciplinary researchers from 40 countries who are filling the gap by providing scientific advice to treaty negotiators.

“Scientific evidence has brought us to this point. We’re going to need scientific evidence to go forward in the right way,” he says.

How did he feel in June witnessing nations come together to agree on the need to ban or regulate microplastics – knowing he was at least a part of the reason they were all there? Thompson takes a rare pause in our conversation. “That’s actually making me quite emotional to think about,” he says.

Weeks later, he elaborates. “A whole body of evidence brought us to where we are now with the UN treaty, and even the discussions about microplastics,” he says. “But it was quite a moving moment from a personal perspective, that I felt you could draw a line right back to that paper in 2004.”

Government delegations will gather in Nairobi, Kenya, to hammer out details of what could be the first global treaty to tackle the plastic pollution crisis.

A key focus for the discussions on Monday will be whether targets to restrict plastic production should be decided unilaterally or whether states should choose their own targets; this is, say environmentalists, the “centre of gravity” for the treaty’s ambition.

At the last round of negotiations in Paris in May run by the international negotiating committee (INC) the US, Saudi Arabia, India and China favoured a “Paris-style” agreement where states would have the freedom to determine their own commitments, while others, including Africa and many developing countries, preferred strong global commitments.

But there are signs, some observers say, of a shift in the US’s position on this key issue, though details have yet to emerge. “The main takeaway for many environmental groups, after INC2 [the negotiations in Paris], was how bad the US position was, in terms of Paris-style voluntary commitments,” said Graham Forbes, the global plastics campaign lead for Greenpeace USA. He said there had been signals of a shift.

“We are going to be watching very closely to see how that plays out. We need to be speaking about rules and putting in place regulations.”

Last month, a “zero draft” version of the text published by the INC as the basis of negotiations over what the head of the United Nations Environment Programme has described as the most important multilateral treaty since the Paris accord in 2015. The goal is to have a formal treaty in place by the end of 2024. This third round of talks, in Kenya from 13-17 November, will mark the halfway point.

The “zero draft” captures many different perspectives from different governments. In the section relating to virgin plastic production, the draft sets out three options for working towards a reduction of primary plastic. The first involves a globally agreed target for reduction, (similar to the Montreal Protocol). The second involves global targets for production reduction, with nationally determined restrictions, similar to the Paris agreement. The third involves nationally determined targets and restrictions.

Tim Grabiel, a senior lawyer at the Environmental Investigations Agency, said it was hoping for something between option one and two: “The Montreal Protocol is generally agreed to be the best multilateral environmental agreement in the world,” Grabiel said. “And we know, from the Paris agreement, that option number two doesn’t work. If you look at the global stock-take, with the hottest summer on record, which is likely to be the coldest summer for the rest of our lives, the shortcomings of the Paris agreement are becoming clear.”

“This is the centre of gravity for ambition and we will see, next week, where countries fall.” But, he acknowledged, “the geopolitics are very difficult on this issue. The big oil and chemical companies have not budged at all.”

Plastic waste is accelerating, projected to almost triple by 2060, with about half ending up in landfill and less than a fifth recycled, according to a 2022 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report.

Greenpeace is calling for a reduction of at least 75% of plastic production by 2040, in order to keep greenhouse gas emissions within a 1.5C scenario.

Eirik Lindebjerg, the global plastics policy lead at WWF, said the “zero draft” captures some “good concrete measures” that could make a difference, he said, as well as some vague, voluntary and non-binding clauses. Importantly, it creates a path for discussion of global bans that can be built on, he said.

“Despite the setbacks I’m very encouraged that a clear majority of countries have stated in the process that they want a strong treaty with binding rules and they have proposed a global basis for phase-outs of materials,” said Lindebjerg.

“There are large economic interests vested in keeping the status quo,” he said. “But you also have a strong public outcry and public pressure, against those interests. We will see who will win in the end.”

This month, the 60 ministers of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, issued a joint statement, reaffirming their commitment to ending plastic waste by 2040 and for a treaty based on the full life cycle of plastics. They expressed a “deep concern” over projections of a near-doubling of mismanaged plastic waste and increase in production that would lead to a 60% increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic system.