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PacWastePlus Steering Committee Meeting Report, 2024

The Project Steering Committee is established to guide the development and implementation of the PacWaste Plus Programme, ensuring a fair and reasonable decision-making process for project priorities
and funding allocations. The committee meets on an annual basis to discuss project activity and confirm activity ahead of project closure in June 2025. The 2024 programme Steering Committee Meeting and associated other programme capacity building sessions were held from July 31 – August 2, 2024, in Funafuti, Tuvalu.

Pacific Waste Curriculum Toolkit

Thinking about our waste, and where it goes once, we have thrown it away, is often the last thing on students’ minds. This toolkit aims to provide teachers across the Pacific with resources and activities that will allow them to increase awareness of the issues surrounding waste generation and disposal, as well as enabling students to plan and implement strategies appropriate to their schools, homes, and communities to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

This toolkit has been created for teachers/educators in the Pacific region. It has been designed to complement existing curricula in the region. This curriculum package comprises of the following 9 Units:

1. What is waste?
2. Waste in my country
3. Reducing Waste
4. Waste as a Resource
5. Waste at School
6. E-Waste
7. Waste in our Waterways
8. Waste in the Ocean
9. Advocacy and Action for Change

Each unit comprises several lessons with lesson plans that outline the scope and sequence of lessons. Lessons progress by stages and subject matter. Lessons can be taught in a sequence, or lessons selected to suit your own teaching needs.

This Resource Guide provides an overview of the lessons, resources and activities, subject area, and age-group categories available to you under each unit. The activities provided have been developed with the Pacific teaching and learning context in mind and is specifically designed for each of the 15 participating PacWastePlus programme countries.

https://www.sprep.org/publications/pacific-waste-curriculum-resource-toolkit

Legislation Guidance End-of-Life Vehicle Management in the Pacific

PacWastePlus is assisting Pacific Island Countries to improve the management of End-Of-Life vehicles and End-of-Life Tyres by providing guidelines and technical notes on safe handling and dismantling and options for in-country management of these items. This guideline is to provide a legislative guiding template with a technical drafting note that creates an enabling environment for the effective management of end-of-life vehicles at a scale and technological complexity that is financially viable and suitable for the Pacific Islands.

Standard Operating Procedure – Bay Composting Organics Processing Facility

This SOP guides the effective composting process, providing supervisors and staff the background and guidance on activities to operate and run a compost facility safely, effectively, and efficiently in the region.

Countries are encouraged to utilise this framework to effectively enhance the operations of their compost facilities.

Practitioner’s Guideline on Depollution on End-Of-Life Vehicles: Depollution Guideline

The main objective of this guideline is to provide practitioners in the automotive and waste management industries with a comprehensive and practical resource for executing effective depollution processes. This guideline aims to encompass the entire lifecycle of an end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), from the initial assessment of hazardous components to the final destination of depolluted and hazardous materials.

By outlining step-by-step procedures, safety measures, and disposal protocols, this guideline seeks to minimise environmental contamination and promote the safe handling of hazardous substances. This guide was developed for PacWaste Plus participating countries to address the ELV depollution before being baled and shipped to the designated country where further ELV processing can be done.

The target audience of this guideline are the managers and technicians at the depollution and dismantling site, and other local recycler owner-operators. This guideline does not constitute binding regulation and is developed for advisory purposes alone.

21 Step Advance Recovery Fee and Deposit (ARFD) Workbook

Designing and implementing a successful, evidence-based ARFD is a multifaceted process, requiring the collection of data, undertaking meaningful stakeholder consultation, and acknowledging and incorporating differing views to make decisions to meet the specific local needs. It may feel like a daunting process. The 21-Step Pathway breaks the process down into logical, manageable steps.

This Workbook is designed to assist users through the completion of each of the 21 steps at a self-managed pace. Each step on the 21-Step Pathway is a chapter in the Workbook.

This Workbook can be used by anyone seeking to design an ARFD scheme to be set in legislation or regulation. It will be of value to by any individual or group involved in the design of an ARFD scheme, for example:

• Government representatives investigating the feasibility of an ARFD scheme or who have been tasked with developing a scheme
• A Working Group tasked with developing a scheme, or contributing to one or more steps of the 21-Step Pathway
• Private Sector or NGO representatives seeking to assist with the design of an ARFD scheme, or contributing to one or more steps of the 21-Step Pathway

The broad goals of an ARFD Scheme are to improve rates of recycling through the provision of an incentive for consumers to recycle (by providing an immediate financial reward (the refund of their “deposit”) when they drop eligible items at a depot), changing behaviour away from littering, burning, or disposing to landfill, and a self-sustainable funding source for governments/recyclers to undertake the collection, transport, processing, and export/recycling of recoverable materials (using the “fee” component which is calculated as the true cost of recycling each eligible item), providing an economically viable ability to undertake recycling/transfer activities long term, not reliant on variable government funds.

Introduction to a Pacific Circular Economy

Globally, consumption patterns generally following a linear “take-make-waste” model. In the Pacific and Timor-Leste this means that items are imported or manufactured, and, at the end of their useful life, there are limited viable alternatives but for the items to be disposed into overflowing landfills or the environment. When items are disposed without recycling, we are throwing away precious materials, resulting in the need for new resources to be extracted.

This linear model impacts Pacific islands and Timor-Leste by contributing to :

• overflowing landfills – waste disposed estimated at 1,141 tonnes per day
• marine pollution - marine plastic pollution potential of estimated at 365 tonnes per day
• terrestrial pollution (burned, buried, littered, or dumped) - estimated at 227 tonnes per day
• and climate change, and biodiversity loss effects.

The costs of this linear model are borne by national and local governments for landfill management – cost of disposing waste for the region an estimated USD $44,293 per day1 – and by the health of communities and the environment.

Reducing Plastic Production to Achieve Climate Goals: Key Considerations for the Plastics Treaty Negotiations

Plastic production is currently on an upward trajectory and is projected to continue increasing exponentially. Global plastic polymer production doubled from 2000 to 2019, reaching 460 million tonnes (Mt) per year,1 and it is anticipated to almost triple from 2019 levels by 2050.2 This uncontrolled growth threatens the global climate, as well as human health, biodiversity, human rights, and environmental justice.

The world is already experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change, which will worsen with each fraction of a degree of warming. To minimize further temperature rise and avoid truly catastrophic climate change, GHG emissions must be reduced urgently anywhere that they can be effectively and rapidly cut. Scaling back plastic production represents one such area. The Paris Agreement, which makes no reference to fossil fuels or their petrochemical derivatives, does not ensure adequate action to address the climate impacts of plastics. It leaves the decision of where to curb emissions and by how much to States. Even if fully implemented, States’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement remain woefully inadequate to limit warming to 1.5°C.6 The global plastics treaty thus must complement the efforts of this agreement to ensure a swift and effective reduction in emissions from plastics.

Several Member States of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution have already identified the need to tackle global plastic production to address the climate crisis. This brief aims to inform the ongoing plastics treaty negotiations by compiling the current evidence on how prevailing production trends are fundamentally incompatible with achieving planetary climate goals, and provides recommendations on how obligations to address plastic production could be incorporated in the treaty to support their achievement.

INC Fact Sheet: Bioplastics 101

Pacific Island countries, like others around the world, are evaluating their plastics use. The global bioplastics market (bio-based and/or biodegradable plastics) is projected to increase in the next decade, with their use in a range of sectors including agriculture/horticulture, aquaculture, fisheries, and food and non-food packaging. While in restricted and specific applications they may bring some advantages over conventional durable fossil-based plastics caution is required to ensure these materials do not become regrettable substitutions, presenting hazards to organisms and human health, or contributing to social, economic and environmental burdens.

This fact sheet aims to provide Pacific Islands delegates the scientific evidence necessary to negotiate Core Obligation 8: Safe, Sustainable Alternatives and Substitutes (UNEP/PP/INC.2/4) and Part II Section 5d of the Zero Draft (UNEP/PP/INC.3/4) in a fully informed manner.

INC Fact Sheet: Strengthening the Global Plastics Treaty with Indigenous Pacific People’s Knowledge

The global plastics treaty (GPT) mandates the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to create binding rules based on the best available science, traditional knowledge, knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local knowledge systems (Res 5/14). The knowledge and practices of Indigenous Pacific Island Peoples are deeply rooted in a respectful and mutual co-existence with the natural world. New materials, products, and technologies offer advantages, yet bring pollutants that were not present pre-colonization. Plastic pollution harms sustainability, ecosystems, culture, economies, health, and well-being. Polymers and petrochemicals are not produced in the region. Nevertheless, Pacific Islands communities are severely impacted by plastic pollution from the increasing volumes of plastics entering the region via trade, tourism, fishing, and tidal flows - and never leaving.

INC Fact Sheet: Plastics Alternatives and Substitutes 101

Many INC delegates indicated that the scope of the treaty should include plastics alternatives and substitutes. However, there are no internationally agreed definitions of plastics alternatives nor plastics substitutes. Sound definitions will support fully informed treaty negotiations. International agreements emphasize the need to promote the human health, environmental, economic, and social risks, costs, and implications of alternative substances (e.g., Art. 9 Stockholm Convention1; see also Art. 1 Convention). International legal instruments also note that when considering substitutes, the potential environmental benefits or penalties of substitute materials or activities (i.e., negative externalities) must be considered.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has developed the following plastics alternatives and substitutes definitions: Plastics Alternatives are plastics not made with conventional fossil-fuel based polymers(i.e., bioplastics).

Plastics Substitutes are all other non-plastic materials that may be used to replace synthetic fossil fuel-based polymers and bioplastics. Some examples are glass, leather, wood, silk, paper, cotton, wool, stone, ceramic, and aluminum