Author Archive

Alexis McGivern

Alexis is an MPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment, looking at the politics of waste incineration and the communities who are resisting incinerators in the UK. Outside of Oxford, she does research with the Plastic Pollution Emissions Working Group, an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists researching plastic pollution.

Actors around the world have taken up increasingly ambitious strategies to tackle plastic pollution: public-private partnerships like the Circulate Capital Ocean Fund; European Union strategies like banning commonly used- single-use products; and large international conferences like Our Oceans. Still, plastic waste remains a tangible and prominent environmental issue. Policymakers are wondering if the current spate of solutions will be enough to bring us to mitigate plastic waste effectively. In this article, I will examine how much and what kind of effort would be needed to significantly reduce plastic pollution emissions. I leveraged research from The Plastic Pollution Emissions Working Group (PPEG). The PPEG—a team of scientists, policy wonks, and practitioners working together under a grant from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis …