IT’S hard to believe we’re still waiting. The plastic bottle, especially the water bottle, has long been symbol of the profligate disposability of our times – and yet, more than 10 years after a deposit return scheme was mooted, almost two decades after Germany introduced its version, we are still not quite there on it being rolled out in Scotland. Not only that, but hot on the heels of the news of the scheme’s delay till August 2023, we learn that it fails to include a digital system that could allow bottles to be returned in home kerbside collections.

When it finally arrives, I’d like to be able to celebrate the SNP-Green deposit return scheme, but I imagine my feeling will be more one of relief. That’s not because of the recent delays circular economy minister Lorna Slater has announced to the scheme. It’s because of the wider context of plastic pollution; because deposit return reminds me of the myriad ways in which we are not dealing with the enormity of this waste.

READ MORE: Beach plastic: the truth according to those who pick it

Whilst I applaud many of the individual measures being taken against plastic, for instance, Scotland’s upcoming ban on the manufacture and supply of single-use plastic cutlery, plates and stirrers and polystyrene food containers due to be introduced this June – especially since, as yet, the UK Government doesn’t have a date for a similar ban – for me, they are only reminders of a need for a bolder approach.

Solving this problem can’t be a matter of, one by one, banning bags, then straws, then cotton buds, then plastic food packaging on vegetables. We need a faster track with more urgency. We need, as a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency recently put it, a “UN plastic treaty” with binding targets, as we have now with climate.

For, in spite of the David Attenborough effect around ocean plastic waste, it feels as if we are only tinkering. If this were a dam we were trying to plug, we would be putting our fingers in just a couple of holes as the rest continued to gush. Plastic, in its macro, micro and nano forms, keeps steadily flooding the environment. A 2017 report by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation and World Economic Forum predicted that, by 2050, plastic in the oceans would outweigh fish.

Meanwhile, we in Scotland should remind ourselves that while we’re ahead of the UK in terms of such plastic legislation, trumpeting our upcoming circular economy bill, there are others we should look to for more ambitious example. Canada, for instance, which has declared plastic “toxic”; or France, where plastic packaging has been banned for a large number of types of fruit and vegetables; India, which introduces a wide-ranging single-use plastic ban this summer.

Scotland’s powers to transform our relationship to plastic may be limited by being part of the UK – and we can see this in the way the UK Internal Market Act threatens the effectiveness of the upcoming single-use plastic bans in Scotland – but we should still be pushing harder.

Indeed, we need to be part of a world which pushes harder against this, our most tolerated pollutant.

At least with greenhouse gases the fight has properly begun and the renewables revolution is well under way. Meanwhile, though the pandemic might have helped us tackle climate change by putting a momentary pause on some travel emissions, it only ramped up the plastic problem.

As the Environmental Investigation Agency points out, what we need is a UN plastic agreement, akin to the global agreements over climate and biodiversity.

Its report observes that “although dedicated multilateral agreements to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change have been in place for nearly 30 years, no such tool currently exists to tackle plastic pollution, despite it being one of the most prevalent and destructive pollutants in existence.”

In this context deposit return seems like one minor triumph. The sad truth is that even as we are halting this flow of bottles, we are flooding our world with other plastics, more difficult to retrieve.

READ MORE: Scotland's sewage shame, worse than England. Tackle it

Data collected during Ocean Race Europe showed that 86 per cent of the microplastics in its seawater samples were microfibres. Studies are already suggesting this could be a toxic timebomb, not just for sealife but for ourselves. One recent report, published in the Journal Of Hazardous Materials showed microplastics cause human cell death, immune response, and damage to cell membranes.

So, yes please, let’s recycle and reuse our plastic bottles, but we are going to have to think bigger. “The plastic emergency” should be the phrase on all our lips; and a UN plastic agreement should be a key global goal.