Professor So Sasaki, Faculty of Economics: Take the Podium as a Panelist at Workshop Hosted by UNEP

On February 1, 2024, Professor So Sasaki of the Faculty of Economics was invited to the workshop “Cost of Inaction and Action for Plastic Pollution”*¹ co-hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) and took the podium online as a panelist at Session 4: “Roadmap to Institutionalize the Assessments.”

Professor Sasaki has analyzed the AI-collected policies throughout the world on plastic pollution and plastic waste. Based on this result*², Sasaki reported that there are only 10 countries or so that are reporting their plastic waste reduction, indicating that there is room for reviewing the current measures. He also noted that the definition of calculating the recycling ratio differs between countries pointing out the difficulty of comparing them globally.

Followings are some topics discussed at the panel discussion; a) although the ability and availability of data increase upstream including plastic manufacturing, the same tends to decrease downstream such as waste disposal and recycling; b) the necessity of structuring a circular economy at emerging countries considering their introduction of extended producer responsibility.

*1）Workshop on “Costs of Inaction and Action for Plastic Pollution”

*2）This report partially applied the accomplishment of SATREPS (JPMJSA1901), Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (ERTDF) (S-19-2(2)）
For details, please refer to “Establishing a circular economy in the Asian region through industry-academia-government collaboration” posted on Chuo University Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration Platform “＋C”.