The urgency behind the paper stems from the state of the negotiations themselves. In March 2022, the United Nations Environmental Assembly convened an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee with the mandate of crafting a legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. It was hailed at the time as the most significant environmental accord since the Paris Agreement. But as the negotiating sessions have progressed, the scientists behind the new paper grew alarmed by what they saw as a glaring omission. Discussions about production caps, chemical restrictions and waste management dominated the agenda, while the unglamorous but foundational question of data—who produces what, in what quantities, using which chemicals, and where it all ends up—received comparatively little attention. “The biggest worry would be that the first version of the Global Plastics Treaty has no reporting requirements,” said Roland Geyer, professor of industrial ecology at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and a co-author of the paper.

Geyer’s concern is grounded in a simple maxim that has shaped environmental regulation for decades: you cannot manage what you do not measure. The researchers point to a series of landmark international agreements that succeeded precisely because they were built on rigorous systems of measurement and reporting. The Montreal Protocol, which regulates ozone-depleting substances, relied on standardized national reporting to verify phase-outs of chlorofluorocarbons. The Basel Convention governs the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes through documentation requirements. The Stockholm Convention tracks persistent organic pollutants, the Minamata Convention monitors mercury compounds, and the Paris Agreement depends on nationally determined contributions and greenhouse gas inventories to hold countries accountable. Each of these treaties tackled problems as daunting as plastic pollution, and each succeeded, at least in part, because the international community agreed to count what mattered.

Domestic environmental law tells a similar story. Geyer notes that foundational American statutes such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act draw their power from the same principle: regulators first establish what is being emitted, discharged or discarded, and only then design rules around the measured reality. Applying that template to plastics would mean requiring countries to standardize how they label plastic products, how they quantify the volumes of different polymer types produced and traded, how they track recycling rates and disposal pathways, and how they archive and share this information in accessible repositories. The framework proposed in the Science paper lays out precisely such a system, covering the full life cycle of plastics from cradle to grave.

“We’re not describing something new,” said Douglas McCauley, professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at UC Santa Barbara and a co-author of the study. “But we realize it’s a bold idea to ask all countries in the world to report detailed data on plastics from cradle to grave.” Bold, the authors concede, but attainable. Even if negotiators cannot agree on contentious questions such as how much plastic humanity should be allowed to produce each year, Geyer argues, they should be able to agree that it would be valuable to know how much is actually produced, which chemicals are used in its manufacture, how it moves through global trade, how much waste it generates, and where that waste ultimately goes. Measurement, unlike production limits, does not require nations to sacrifice anything upfront—yet it creates the evidentiary foundation on which all future action depends.

The scientists are careful not to cast plastics themselves as villains. Both Geyer and McCauley describe the material in terms of tradeoffs rather than evils. Plastic is, in McCauley’s words, a critically important material that performs all kinds of essential functions in modern society, from medical devices to food preservation. The problem, he explains, is that humanity is deploying this wonder material in applications where it is fundamentally the wrong fit. A plastic fork used for five minutes at a picnic could persist in a landfill for more than 500 years. “That is a critical design flaw,” McCauley said. The mismatch is particularly stark when plastics are used for single-use containers, packaging and utensils—products engineered for moments of convenience but built from polymers engineered to last for centuries.

Part of what makes plastic uniquely troublesome, the researchers note, is that it is the first class of synthetic materials that nature categorically cannot reabsorb. Throughout most of human history, waste management was an afterthought because the environment could handle what people discarded. Stone, brick and glass are chemically inert. Paper and wood biodegrade. Most metals corrode and eventually return to the earth. “But plastics just don’t do that,” Geyer said. “Synthetic polymers are the first manmade materials that nature categorically cannot re-assimilate.” The consequence is that plastic is now pervasive, found from the deepest ocean trenches to remote mountain air, inside wildlife and, increasingly, inside human bodies. Public concern, Geyer added, is entirely justified. The risks that microplastics and the chemical additives they carry pose to human health have grown more apparent with each new study, even as global production continues to climb.

The trajectory of production is itself a source of alarm. In 2024, McCauley, Geyer and colleagues published an estimate in Science projecting that plastic use would grow by 37 percent by 2050 if current trends continue. The economic incentives behind this growth are powerful. McCauley explained that plastic increasingly serves as a backup business plan for petrochemical companies, a way to sustain demand for fossil feedstocks as the world’s energy systems transition away from oil and gas. This dynamic means that, absent strong international intervention, the plastic pollution problem is likely to compound even as societies decarbonize their energy supply. Standardized measurement and reporting, the authors argue, is the essential first step toward bending that curve, because it allows the world to track whether any intervention—caps, taxes, redesigned products, recycling mandates—is actually working.

Quanyin Tan, an assistant professor at the School of Environment at Tsinghua University and the paper’s lead author, said the collaboration was motivated by a growing sense that data issues were being sidelined. “As the negotiations progressed, we became increasingly concerned that data and reporting were not receiving the attention we felt they deserved,” Tan explained. Beyond sounding the alarm, the team hopes the paper serves a practical purpose: providing a concrete reference framework that countries can use as they develop or improve their own national reporting systems, rather than leaving each government to invent its approach from scratch. The paper’s proposals are intended to inform a workshop co-hosted by UC Santa Barbara and the World Economic Forum on September 16 and 17 in Geneva, Switzerland, which will bring together scientists, policymakers, industry representatives and implementation experts in a neutral setting to explore different reporting approaches, identify practical tradeoffs, and discuss how scientifically robust reporting can be made feasible for countries with vastly different technical capacities.

The timing matters. A summary of the workshop’s outcomes will be made available to stakeholders ahead of the next round of Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee talks on plastic pollution, scheduled for March 2027. For the scientists involved, the message to negotiators is straightforward: whatever else the treaty achieves, it must not repeat the mistake of tackling a global pollution crisis blindfolded. “In order to understand it, we need to set up this new global reporting program,” McCauley said. Modern society will continue to need plastics for countless applications, he acknowledged, but it must also confront the material’s drawbacks and actively mitigate them. And mitigation, as every successful environmental treaty of the past fifty years has demonstrated, begins with knowing exactly what is out there, where it came from, and where it is going.