Jacob Duer spent 23 years inside the United Nations. The final chapter of that career ended with him locked in a conference room in Geneva for 48 hours straight, negotiating with 195 governments — finishing at 6am on a Saturday to land the Minamata Convention, a legally binding global treaty on mercury pollution.
In 2019, he walked away from all of it to become the founding CEO of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste — a Singapore-based, industry-funded non-profit backed by companies across the entire plastics value chain, from resin producers to retailers.
In this episode, Jacob unpacks why 3 billion people on the planet still have no organised waste collection, why “flexibles” — chip packets, films, plastic bags — are the real crisis (not bottles), why regulation alone was never going to solve this, and why he still believes plastic pollution is solvable in our lifetime.
We also get into the global plastics treaty governments are set to negotiate again in March, and what a genuinely enabling version of that treaty needs to unlock.
Do we have a hope in the future of managing plastic waste? Listen to this conversation to find out.