Plastic pollution: Campaigners want treaty for plastic problem

Plastic is everywhere and it's a huge problem for our environment.

We can find plastic in soils, food and the air we breathe also has plastic micro particles.

Now a new report is calling for a United Nations (UN) agreement to help this global plastic pollution emergency.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) argue that the plastic pollution threat is nearly the same as climate change.

The Treaty

Authors of the report want a UN treaty, which is a formal agreement between nations, with targets for reducing plastic production and plastic waste.

Tom Gammage, from EIA said if this pollution continues without measures in place, then the amount of "plastics in the seas by 2040 could exceed the collective weight of all fish in the ocean."

The United Nations (UN) is a worldwide organisation that brings countries together to talk about and agree on world issues.

The UN have highlighted three environment threats - climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and concluded that they must be addressed together.

But although deals between countries to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change have been in place for nearly 30 years, no such tool currently exists to tackle plastic pollution, the EIA says - they want that to change,

The UN headquarters in New York

Some people are against the plan of a dedicated plastics treaty. However more than 100 countries, including the UK are in favour.

The idea for a treaty will be put forward in February at the next UN Environment Assembly. This is where the priorities for global environmental policies are set.

Why is plastic a problem?

A collection of small plastics found from a water sample

The problem with plastic is that most of it isn't biodegradable. It doesn't rot, like paper or food, so instead it can hang around in the environment for hundreds of years.

Each year, 400 million tonnes of plastic is produced and 40% of that is single-use, which is plastic we'll only use once before it's binned.

Examples of single-use plastic are carrier bags, drinks bottles and crisp packets.

Another issue is that not all plastic can be recycled. This might be because of the way it is made up or because it is too expensive or difficult to do.

Some coffee cups, for example, have a waterproof plastic lining which can make them difficult to recycle.