Today's Deep Diveis 1,074 words and a 7-minute read.
On December 1, international delegates wrapped up a global summit on plastics without a long-awaited agreement on how to manage, or curb, the global effects of plastic products, including waste and pollution from emissions. Despite broad agreement that mismanaged plastic waste contributes to global pollution, global leaders failed for the fifth time to agree on even the most basic principles of a planned UN plastics treaty, leaving implications for governments, industry and conservation unclear yet again.
Plastics Treaty Basics
In March 2022, UN Environmental Assembly delegates voted to approve a resolution to develop an international, legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. Since then, the would-be treaty has been mired in disagreements and failed negotiating rounds, concluding earlier this month with what was intended to be the fifth and final meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC-5) in Busan, South Korea. Per the original timeline, the treaty was supposed to be finalized by this final summit and implemented in 2025 – a timeline that now has no chance of being achieved.
When originally proposed, the treaty was intended as a targeted instrument to address plastic waste and emissions from the production of plastic, including in the marine environment, with the goal of building upon less specific anti-pollution and habitat conservation agreements. Prior to the nascent plastics treaty, no multilateral environmental agreement has directly dealt with plastic waste, although it has been mentioned or implied to be included in various agreements to avoid the dumping of chemicals, protect marine environments, and increase recycling.
Sticking Points in Busan
Analysts knew the Busan summit was likely to be unproductive even before the first session opened in late November. Sentiments among member countries were so divided, even procedural moves to introduce a draft text or codify a voting procedure were anticipated to be significant hurdles. Across four previous negotiating sessions, an unwieldy 70-page draft text featuring a staggering 3,000 brackets (indicating disputed words or sentences) was the primary working document; an effort by the INC Chair to introduce a streamlined "non-paper," meant to function as an unofficial outline, failed to pass. An effort to make new language passed by a majority, rather than a consensus, was also voted down. Once discussions got off the ground, three significant hurdles hampered progress on the treaty: financing for lower-income countries to switch to lower-polluting practices, the use of certain chemicals in plastics and the ultimate roadblock: whether to seek a cap on plastic production.
Issues on financing are a longstanding roadblock in any multilateral environmental agreement. Developing countries cannot afford the cost of transitioning to green technologies, and typically seek assurances of outside funding to offset these costs, as well as sometimes to help make up for lost profits from industries on the decline as a result of the green transition. In the case of the plastics treaty, lower-income countries want to lock down money to finance a move away from single-use plastics, and opinions vary on where those funds should come from. Developing countries are calling for voluntary donations from more developed nations, while higher-income states are pushing for funds to be drawn from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), an existing multilateral environmental fund that serves UN environmental convention goals and is funded by a mix of private and public donations. Critics argue that the GEF is already under-funded to achieve the full scope of its goals, but further voluntary donations are also thorny: past environmental agreements have been hung up for years determining who should pay, how much should be paid, and who should get to benefit, and even once established, voluntary funds of this type have rarely reached their targets.
The regulation of chemicals in plastics was also a sticking point in Busan. While countries have domestic laws of varying strictness regulating the chemical composition of plastic products, there is no internationally comprehensive list of chemicals used or found in plastic (including additives, processing aids, and impurities), and as many as a quarter may be hazardous to humans on some level. Of interest to the delegates in Busan, a report from earlier this year by the PlastChem Project found that only 6% of discoverable chemicals are regulated at an international level. The negotiations also come as global concerns are rising around the health and environmental impacts of microplastics, which have turned out to be more widespread than previously thought. In addition to a significant organizational lift needed to identify and classify all plastic chemicals, there remain significant divisions on how to deal with them: as a result, the current draft treaty barely refers to chemicals.
Whether or not to place limits on the production of new plastic will perhaps be the highest hurdle for an eventual plastic agreement to overcome. The High Ambition Coalition, co-chaired by Rwanda and Norway and comprising some 64 countries, has called for an aggressive approach to curb the production of new plastic products, citing a need to curb emissions and waste and new research that suggests that even optimistic recycling outcomes will not curb a global rise in waste production of all kinds. On the other hand, a coalition of more developed like-minded states has opposed the introduction of hard limits, arguing that even single-use plastics serve an important role in global supply chains (such as the production of sterile medical products). These like-minded nations have called instead for a focus on new technologies to achieve less emissions-intensive plastic production techniques, more efficient recycling processes, and more effective disposal or sequestration of non-recyclable plastic products – such as promising new plastic-eating bacteria.
Future of the Treaty
After concluding what was intended to the final plastics summit in South Korea without a final text, leaders pledged to hold renewed talks next year, although no dates have been announced. It is now virtually impossible for the treaty to take effect in 2025, as was previously intended, and no new roadmap has been announced. While elements of a plastic treaty are beneficial to all – many industry groups support a plastic treaty to provide regulatory clarity, and the plastics industry has moved to make voluntary changes in a bid to ensure consumer trust and confidence – an agreement remains far away, especially as the US changes administrations. Conservationists and industry alike are looking towards technological advances, like plastic-eating bacteria, bio-plastics made from microbes, cellulose, soy protein, or recycled petroleum products, and enhanced chemical recycling, to bridge the gap left unfilled by another year without an international plastic treaty.
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