Transparency and Traceability Intervention at INC3 of the Plastic Treaty
FeaturedThank you Mr. Co-facilitator,
My name is Olga Speranskaya and I speak on behalf of Health and Environment Justice Support (HEJSupport), Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), groundWork South Africa and 12 other organizations and networks working on transparency and traceability of chemical information in plastic materials and products.
Based on the interventions we heard in the last few days, we see good support and understanding of the importance of a globally harmonized approach to the transparency of chemicals of concern in plastic materials and products.
However, to make informed decisions for all life stages of plastics, disclosure of chemical identity in plastics must go hand in hand with the traceability of this information in individual materials and products. Both are necessary preconditions to achieve a toxics-free circular plastics economy and resource efficiency.
To ensure the efficient implementation of an article on transparency and traceability of chemicals, it is essential to set up control measures and means of implementation, including a global database containing data about chemicals in individual materials and products to facilitate informed decision-making for all life stages of plastic and for all stakeholders in the value chain.
Individual materials or products need to be labelled using a data carrier, for example, a digital label with a numerical identifier for a unique entry in the global database from where disclosed chemical composition data for the respective materials and products is retrieved.
There are real-life examples of similar traceability systems that we can draw experiences from. However, we do not need to understand precisely now what system for data carriers we need. Instead, this can be a task for an expert group set up while we wait for the treaty to be ratified or in connection with a future COP. However, we should secure language in the treaty, Article 13, to allow us to formulate later and decide how the transparency and traceability systems should look.
More information is available at: https://www.globalchemicaltransparency.org/#a13lightbox-work-12609
