Majority of people support global rules to end plastic pollution

Governments from around the world have agreed to draw up a global agreement by the end of 2024 to put an end to plastic pollution. As the following chart shows, a majority of polled consumers believe it is important to create such rules.

Across all 34 surveyed countries, a global average of 70 percent of citizens are in support of the creation of global rules for governments to end plastic pollution. This is according to a poll of more than 23,000 adults, carried out by Ipsos in collaboration with the Plastic Free Foundation and WWF.

As our chart shows, Peru and Indonesia were the countries with the highest share of citizens’ showing support for the creation of regulations, each with an overwhelming 81 percent. They were followed by several primarily Latin American and European countries. Of the 34 countries polled, China (59 percent), the United States (58 percent) and Japan (48 percent) had the lowest overall share of support. In Japan’s case, this is mostly accounted for by the fact that 41 percent of the country’s respondents selected that they ‘Don’t know’ whether a treaty should create global rules, rather than strictly disagreeing.

The survey found that consumers find it important for the treaty to include the following key measures: to ban unnecessary single-use plastics and plastic that cannot be easily recycled, to introduce rules that demand manufacturers and retailers to act responsibly by reducing, re-using and recycling plastic packaging, to implement global regulations requiring all new plastic products to contain recycled plastic, and to make sure labels are applied to plastic products that show how to sort them for reuse, recycling or disposal.