Negotiations on a global deal to end plastic pollution continue to sidestep the production of plastics. David Burrows reports.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” These lines, from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, reveal much about our experiences of success and failure. As the world collapses there is shock and pain. But as the dust settles we realise this fallout was all fairly predictable.
And so to the fourth round of plastics treaty talks (INC-4) that took place in Ottawa, Canada, in late April. In 2022, 175 nations signed up to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024. It was always going to be a tight timeline to get something ambitious across the line – and so it has turned out.
“[…] at the current pace… it will be very difficult to close the negotiations at INC5 in November,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, head of the European Commission’s environment department, last month. The website Climate Home News spoke to others that were similarly concerned about the state of the treaty following INC-4.
Scaredy-cap? “It felt like ambition was sacrificed early at the altar of compromise and everyone was afraid to leave with nothing so took something imperfect instead.” That was the initial reaction of Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) campaigner Christina Dixon as she turned in following negotiations in Canada. “Finishing after 3am so I’ll have a lie in now.”
Not in sINC. It was unlikely to be a restful night for those who have been pushing for an ambitious, legally binding agreement. After the penultimate round of talks, countries walked away with a text that many feel is not yet fit for final negotiations in Busan, South Korea later this year. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), had a rather more rose-tinted view: there is now “a clear path to landing an ambitious deal in Busan ahead of us”, she said.
Language barrier. While there was some streamlining of the draft, there have also been more additions than deletions, leading to a text currently riddled with a large number of options. Language is always a barrier that slows such agreements. Those with lower ambitions are “throwing brackets on everything” said Dixon. “It’s hard to feel everyone is negotiating in good faith right now.”
Otta-what? Stopping the flow of plastics is the major sticking point. That plastic pollution is pernicious is not in doubt. It’s whether a cap on production must be part of the solution, or whether we can ‘recycle ourselves out of this’ (as the playbook for plastic producers reads). “The International Negotiating Committee [INC] has once again failed to ask the most fundamental question to the success of the future treaty: how do we tackle the unsustainable production of plastics?,” said Jacob Kean-Hammerson, ocean campaigner at the EIA. “While it is important to discuss the financial aspects, how can we discuss means of implementation without knowing what we are implementing?”
Thumbs up. Countries decided to progress with inter-sessional work on the financial mechanism, as well as on plastic products, chemicals of concern in plastic products, product design, reusability, and recyclability. The negative impacts of plastic production to frontline communities living near petrochemicals and plastics production facilities, as well as the impact of the chemicals in plastics and microplastics on human health, are also now high profile issues.
Thumb wars. Lobbyists are demanding risk assessments to demonstrate plastics’ impacts on human health before taking action, work that would take decades to do, according to some. “In many industries, companies have long promoted the idea that polluting nature is acceptable until risk assessments show otherwise,” wrote Martin Wagner, a professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, before the talks began. “Although this is an ethical rather than a scientific question, such reasoning allows potentially harmful products to remain on the market.” Wagner was recently involved in research that found more than 16,000 different chemicals in plastics – about a quarter of which can be hazardous to health and the environment.
Thumbs down. The biggest question negotiators face currently is not what type of plastic remains on the market but how much. Excluding upstream measures – to focus on plastic management and recycling – during this period between talks will make including a cap on production a daunting task. Campaigners and scientists say this ignores the central role of plastics production in fuelling the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises.
In the green corner. There was disappointment in particular that those who have joined together in a so-called ‘high ambition bloc’ supported the inter-sessional work. The coalition includes the UK, the European Union and Australia.
Caps doffed. More than 50 countries are now reportedly in favour of a cap, though. Perú and Rwanda have been roundly applauded by green NGOs as champions for presenting a proposal for inter-sessional work on primary plastic polymers with aims to reduce 40% of the global use of primary plastics polymers by 2040 from 2025 levels.
Reuse revolution. The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty is also supportive of a cap on production. The coalition, which boasts members including Starbucks, Nestlé and Coca-Cola, also said scaling reuse and refill models provides “one of the greatest opportunities for the treaty to promote collective action by policymakers, businesses, and financial institutions”. Progress at INC-4 on issues such as restrictions and extended producer responsibility (EPR) were welcomed, but there is too much emphasis on voluntary approaches, the coalition noted. WWF flagged similar concerns, with “important progress” made on what the treaty will do but little sight of whether this will be a legally binding global agreement or “a voluntary watered-down agreement led by least common denominator values?”.
Corporate comfort zone. NGOs have been enthused by how food and drink businesses, through initiatives like the coalition, have generally aligned with their thinking on plastic pollution and what an effective treaty could look like. But some believe companies are not all quite as comfortable with this as campaigners think (or the public statements suggest). In his blog for Nature, Wagner warned that corporations are “trying to control the scientific narrative by ‘domesticating’ the community. They create and support meetings, research projects and learned societies to ostensibly ‘support science’, while redefining it.” (Think McDonald’s, the European Paper Packaging Alliance and the EU’s packaging and packaging waste regulations for example).
In the black corner. The oil, gas and petrochemical producers like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are unsurprisingly fiercely opposed to any kind of plastic production cap. They have invested heavily in a future reliant on single-use plastics. These “spoilers”, as some NGOs have referred to them, want the focus to be on more recycling. An analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), in collaboration with a number of NGOs, showed a 37% increase in fossil fuel lobbyists at the INC-4 talks versus INC-3.
What, US? The US also found itself on the same side as Russia and China during the talks. “Rather than showing leadership, the United States has remained disappointedly in the middle,” Julie Teel Simmonds, a spokesperson for the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tucson, Arizona, told Inside Climate News. “The US proposals lack binding targets and focus on cutting demand for plastic rather than production itself.”
Round in circles. The petro-states and plastics producers continued to try and reopen and sow doubts over the scope of the draft treaty to redefine what the full lifecycle of plastic means – which is considered key to the success of an ambitious treaty. “We need to take a life cycle approach, which means re-examining how products are designed, produced and distributed,” explained INC executive secretary Jyoti Mathur-Filipp last year. “Approaches that only target one element of the economy, such as recycling, fall short of addressing the issue.”
Cap crunch. The language of life cycle approaches remains in the draft. Some negotiators feel that some NGOs are fixated on a cap when other instruments could produce the same result. An increase in the use of recycled content used in plastic packaging for example would diminish the need for virgin materials, they argue. The counter-argument is that a cap forces such shifts.
Carbon cost. The trajectory for virgin plastic production is eye-wateringly large. Research published in April by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, calculated that “under a conservative growth scenario (2.5%/year), GHG emissions from primary plastic production would more than double to 4.75 GtCO2e by 2050, accounting for 21-26% of the remaining global carbon budget to keep average temperature increases below 1.5°C”.
Look south. The final talks, INC-5, are scheduled for the end of November in South Korea. Commenting on potential delays to a final treaty, EIA’s Dixon said: “[…] more time doesn’t necessarily mean a better treaty if the political will isn’t there to tackle to most pressing issues […]. It can still be done, but we’ll need all of the ambitious countries to work on keeping the most critical elements, such as dealing with plastic production, at play,” she added. Mathur-Filipp said: “Compromise and commitment remains strong at this advanced stage of the negotiations.” That’s maybe what campaigners are worried about.
