In April, representatives of more than 150 countries traveled to Canada to hammer out the details of an international, legally binding treaty to tackle the plastic crisis. It was the fourth of five negotiation sessions, with the process set to be completed later this year.

If all goes according to plan, the result will be a Paris Agreement for plastic.

“Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”

Just like during international climate summits, the companies driving the crisis are showing up in numbers to try to shape the outcome of the negotiations. Also familiar: Many advocates and experts say that treaty progress is not moving fast enough given the urgency the situation demands. In a press release commenting on the April meeting in Ottawa, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International pointed out that more than 15 million tons of plastic entered the ocean during the week of negotiations.

“Countries have made important progress in Canada with constructive discussions on what the treaty will actually do, but the big decisions still remain: Will we get the strong treaty with common global rules that most of the world is calling for, or will we end up with a voluntary watered-down agreement led by least-common-denominator values?” said Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF International’s global plastics policy lead. “Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”

Nivedita Biyani, an expert on plastic waste, was in Ottawa attempting to provide policymakers with data they could use to make smarter decisions.

Biyani has been working to understand and improve waste management for about 12 years, in poor neighborhoods in India that lack infrastructure, for the government of Singapore, and now as a researcher at U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she looks at “mass flows” of plastic—aka “how materials travel through production to end-of-life and become waste.”

Her latest project: the Global Plastics AI Policy Tool, developed with Douglas McCauley, the director of UCSB’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, and Roland Geyer, a prominent industrial ecologist.

Nivedita Biyani

Building on a 2017 paper Geyer published that estimated how much plastic had ever been made, the team set out to show what kind of impact 11 policy interventions—including capping production, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling infrastructure—would have on reducing plastic pollution through 2050. To do so, they used a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, that included GDP and population data to model future years.

The tool estimates that in 2024, 129.7 million metric tons of plastic waste will be incinerated, 173.6 million metric tons will end up in landfills, and 73.5 million metric tons will end up in the environment. From there, without drastic changes to business as usual, the numbers just keep climbing.