Talks to secure a global plastics treaty reached a dead-end in December, but there are high hopes for a deal this year as a strong ‘coalition of the willing’ emerges. By David Burrows
No deal. Countries negotiating an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, adjourned their fifth session (INC-5) last month with agreement on a ‘Chair’s Text’ that will serve as the starting point for negotiations at a resumed session in 2025. In other words, they fell short of the ambition to push through a treaty in the space of two years.
Dodgy deals. “The plastics industry, aka Big Oil, must be dancing for joy,” said Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet and The Plastic Health Council. “They threw everything possible at these UN Plastics Treaty negotiations – hundreds of lobbyists; expensive ad campaigns; buckets of misinformation, extraordinary delaying tactics. When you have limitless funding from fossil fuels, derailing the negotiations is small change.”
Dealbreakers. Fossil fuel companies see plastic as their off-ramp as the net tightens (slowly but with certainty) around oil and gas production. NGOs and those countries, including the UK, that have been supporting an ambitious treaty expected a dirty fight and they got one. Countries complained of talks stalling in contact groups as a small number of member states began negotiating in “bad faith”, according to some reports.
The cap fits. Or not. The main points of divergence were a possible target of reducing the production of primary plastic polymers, bans and restrictions of chemicals of concern in plastic products, as well as problematic and avoidable plastic products. It is on this that major oil-producing countries and the “High Ambition Coalition” – countries which include the EU, the UK, Canada, as well as many African, Latin American and Pacific countries – could not find convergence.
Dead deal? What followed were warnings that the failure (which followed a less than convincing COP29 climate round of talks late last year) is a sign of how “the entire edifice of environmental diplomacy is creaking”, as Bloomberg Green put it. This certainly casts a dark cloud on 2024 but silver linings are being sought.
Willing for a deal. Asked about the fallout during a post-INC-5 webinar, and reflecting on COP29 and COP16 (the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in autumn 2024) Richard Wielechowski, lead analyst on petrochemicals and plastics at Planet Tracker, explained how “we’ve got these […] more ambitious groups of countries who want to come together, the ‘coalition of the willing’; maybe we are going to see increasingly them taking steps forward, saying we’re not going to wait for those who are dragging their feet, the blockers, who continue to play defence… we’re going to go and do these things ourselves”.
PBAM, no thank you ma’am. That would be complicated (think carbon border adjustment mechanisms but for plastics – a PBAM) and it’s far from clear how it could work. What is clear is that this ‘coalition of the willing’ has snowballed. “It would be easy to conclude that the week had been a failure; that the process is severely off track; that the Like-Minded group have won,” wrote Sam Winton from the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth. “All of these have a basis in truth, but they are not the overwhelming feelings I have 24 hours on. Instead, I saw an ambitious group of well over 100 members face down unambitious proposals and flatly reject them. I believe that the overwhelming message that we should take away from Busan is that a line has been drawn and that the commitment to strong measures, particularly on chemicals and supply, is stronger than ever.”
Better than a bad deal. Nestlé global public affairs lead for packaging and sustainability Jodie Roussell’s glass remains half full too, as she explained how the deal has been slimmed down significantly to just 22 pages and thousands of brackets have been removed (every set of brackets is a portion of text that at east one member state has disagreed with). “We have avoided the worst possible outcome, which would have been a weak treaty, or a treaty based entirely on voluntary national commitments,” she said.
Next up? Is INC-5.2, as negotiations on curbing plastic production and pollution now leak into 2025. Christina Dixon, ocean campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency, said INC-5 “marked a turning point in the negotiations as a large and wide-eyed majority of countries have united around an ambitious vision for the treaty going forward”. Environmental diplomacy may well be creaking and governments will be faced with a choice, said the ‘Business coalition for a global plastics treaty’, whose members include Coca-Cola, Danone, Ikea, Nestlé and Starbucks. The coalition said: “They can continue negotiating a treaty with universal support but little impact. Or they can agree on a treaty based on strong global rules across the full lifecycle of plastics and with a comprehensive financing mechanism, confident in knowing that this is what the majority of governments, business and citizens want.”
