Has plastic pollution reached its tipping point?

It’s all over our homes, in the clothes on our backs, and is vital to the operation of global trade, including the food system. Yet plastic – once hailed as a miracle material – is now causing enormous damage to the environment, not only through the carbon required to produce it, but also via the pollution it creates.

On 25 November, members of the United Nation’s environment committee will meet in South Korea to finalise the Global Plastic Treaty, with the document due to be signed in 2025. This legally binding agreement follows on from the end plastic pollution resolution, which was adopted in 2022, and will cover all stages of plastic production, use and waste management.

The treaty’s focus on better product design, comprehensive recycling and eliminating all non-essential single-use plastics will require innovative solutions. Luckily, many new ideas developed by scientists, designers and engineers are already in the pipeline.

Novel technologies that rely on unlikely ingredients such as food waste, fungus and friendly bacteria have the potential to revolutionise industries such as packaging and textiles. Which is fortunate, because there’s no time to waste – the world currently produces around 435m metric tonnes of plastic each year, according to a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with production projected to rise to 736m metric tonnes by 2040 if we continue at current rates. Of this total, around half are single-use.

Russia’s drone pipeline: How Iran helps Moscow produce an ever-evolving unmanned fleet

With Russian ground troops bogged down in a grinding war of attrition, Moscow is striving to press home its advantage in the skies – through an ever-evolving army of drones, courtesy of Iran.

In early January, wreckage of a drone found in Ukraine hinted at a new high-speed model of drone being deployed by Russia in the conflict. It prompted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to air fears over failing to keep pace. “We produce (drones) at about 1,000 a day. We really produce them, but it’s not enough. It’s still not enough,” he told an audience of political business leaders at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 22, 2026.

Ukrainian intelligence suggests that Moscow, too, will also soon be pumping out 1,000 drone units a day, in large part thanks to the support and technical assistance of Iran. A central concern for Ukraine is Russia’s increasing production of long-range attack drones that it has used in mass attacks to strike targets in Ukraine.

Tehran’s role in supplying Russia with hundreds of long-range, kamikaze-style drones is long known. But what has gone largely unnoticed outside Ukraine is Iran’s central role in teaching Russia to produce these drones itself.

As an expert on weapons technology and former assistant director of the CIA for weapons and counterproliferation, I believe use of Iranian technology has helped Russia develop a fleet of sophisticated drones able to erode Ukrainian air defenses and strain the country’s resolve. By doing so, Moscow is able to preserve more expensive missiles for long-range precision strikes.