Negotiations for a global plastics treaty ended on Dec. 2, without a consensus on how to curb plastic pollution despite its increasing negative impacts on people and nature.
The fifth meeting of the U.N. Environment Programme’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) in Busan, South Korea was expected to produce a legally binding global treaty covering the entire life cycle of plastic, from its production to consumption and disposal.
However, the around 170 negotiating countries failed to agree on key decisions, primarily on curbing production, pushing the talks to continue at a later date, Reuters reported.
More than 100 countries, led by Panama, called for creating a pathway toward setting targets for reducing plastic production, although they suggested agreeing on specific numbers in the future. However, oil-producing countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council, opposed the cap on production of plastic, which is derived from oil and gas byproducts. They instead pushed for a voluntary deal to focus on plastic waste, The Washington Post reported.
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s lead negotiator, said the stalled talks were a “moral failure.”
“What we saw in Busan was a weaponization of consensus by a small number of countries to stall progress and undermine the negotiations,” David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environment Law (CIEL), said in a statement.
CIEL environment health campaigner Rachel Radvany said the U.S. could have played an important role in the negotiations, but it “refused to push beyond voluntary measures and answer the call … for legally binding measures.”
Nearly 70 nations in the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, alongside NGOs, also pushed for a phase-out and ban on certain plastic products and chemicals of concern, to protect human health and the environment.
But Saudi Arabia argued that doing so wasn’t within the scope of the treaty, and that the focus should be on addressing plastic pollution.
Advocacy nonprofit Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) said in a statement that while negotiations will continue, they’re “at risk of being undermined by the self-serving interests of petrostates and fossil fuel companies, which have hindered progress on climate change.”
BFFP added that INC-5 chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso, in his proposed texts of the treaty, failed to serve the groups most impacted by plastic pollution and excluded from the negotiations.
“In the current text, there is no direct mention of the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Likewise, the current text does not list chemicals of concern, nor does it include direct obligations, criteria, and transparency provisions, among other red lines that cannot be crossed without perpetuating the harms of plastic pollution, especially on frontline communities,” BFFP said, adding that the text “has too many options, weak language, and a lack of clear definitions.”
Banner image of civil society groups protesting at the INC-5 meeting in Busan, South Korea. Image courtesy of Seunghyeok Choi/Break Free From Plastic.
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