BEING by the sea, we all know the threat plastic pollution poses.

Thousands of plastic items, such as bottle tops, wash up on the Cornish coastline every year. Plastic on our beaches has gone from being an inconvenience, to a common occurrence.

In Cornwall, we're lucky to have a community that actively protests against plastic waste, with another Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) National Day of Action taking place only this past Saturday. we also have very active Plastic Free Falmouth and Plastic Free Cornwall organisations that do so much work raising awareness and cleaning up our coasts. Ably helped by our schoolchildren who write to me on the subject on a regular basis.

SAS have long been advocates of legally binding targets to cut plastic pollution and implementing a circular economy focused on reuse and refill — and that's exactly what we discussed at an Environment Food & Rural Affairs Select committee earlier this month in a one-off evidence session focusing on the Global Plastics Treaty, as part of our broader inquiry into preventing waste and enabling a circular economy.

Negotiations for a new Global Plastics Treaty were scheduled to finish in November 2024 in South Korea. Unfortunately, the final round of talks failed to reach an agreement and another round of talks is scheduled to take place next month in Geneva, Switzerland. One area the committee wanted to explore was the barriers that need to be overcome to achieve an agreement in the August talks.

We heard from representatives from Greenpeace, the Waste Law Research Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, the British Plastics Federation, and the co-ordinator of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, to name only a few.

After the evidence session the EFRA Committee wrote to DEFRA Minister Emma Hardy, with recommendations to the Government, in the run-up to the international treaty negotiations.

In our letter, we argued that "legally binding targets for reducing production of primary plastics are essential if the tide is to be turned on plastic pollution”. In what would be a strong a show of soft power, we also urged the Government to refuse to sign any agreement which lacks this vital element.

Shockingly, we also heard that many independent scientists that take part in the treaty negotiations can face significant pressure and even threats.

There are more levers we can pull as a nation. As well as playing a prominent role in the treaty talks this government is making moves to end our throwaway society and stop an avalanche of plastic hitting our beaches.

We are committed to creating a roadmap to a zero-waste economy, one of DEFRA’s core priorities; our Deposit Return scheme for drinks containers promotes a circular economy by targeting single-use drinks containers made of PET plastic, steel and aluminium; and this government has also announced plans to ban single-use disposable vapes with almost five million single-use vapes thrown into general waste each week last year.

Back in 2022, the previous EFRA committee found that global plastic waste was forecast to almost triple by 2060. We cannot let that happen.