Plastics pollution and governance

Jacob Hasselbalch and Joachim Peter Tilsted

Chapter 37 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Business and Government, 2026, pp 212-217 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The governance of the global plastic system is a rich battleground of business-government interaction. Plastics have recently ascended to becoming one of the defining environmental problems of our time, with negative impacts on climate change, ocean ecosystems, and human health, among other things. At the same time, plastics have many essential uses in modern societies. Their extreme flexibility makes plastics an enormously difficult regulatory problem. In this entry, we first introduce the scope of the global plastics pollution challenge, before then continuing throughout the life cycle of plastics, mapping the important locations and issues where business, government, and civil society come into confrontation. Key to the future of plastics governance is the matter of continued growth in the petrochemical sector, which places difficult constraints on the effectiveness of all regulation. Both bottom-up mobilization and top-down regulation of the plastics system are required to ensure sustainable futures.

Keywords: Petrochemicals; Pollution; Circular economy; Recycling; Decarbonization; Degrowth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035307777
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