What was supposed to be the final round of United Nations negotiations for a global plastics treaty ended without an agreement on Sunday, as delegates failed to reconcile opposing views on whether to impose a cap on plastic production.
Another negotiating session — dubbed INC-5.2 after this week’s INC-5 — will be held in 2025, but it’s unclear how countries will make further progress without a change in the treaty’s consensus-based decision-making process. As it stands, any delegation can essentially veto a proposal they don’t like, even if they’re opposed by most of the rest of the world.
“If it wasn’t for Saudi and Russia we would have reached an agreement here,” one European negotiator told the Financial Times. Those two countries, along with other oil producers like Iran and Kuwait, want the plastics treaty to leave production untouched and focus only on downstream measures: boosting the plastics recycling rate, for example, and cleaning up existing plastic pollution.
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Dozens of countries — supported by scientists and environmental groups — say that approach is futile while the plastics industry plans to dramatically increase plastic production. “You can talk about waste management all you want, but this is not the silver bullet,” one of the European Union’s delegates said last week. “Mopping the floor when the tap is open is useless.”
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Technically, the treaty could move forward without Saudi Arabia, Russia, and their allies, either continuing under the U.N. framework or — a more radical scenario — in a new forum led by a breakaway alliance of countries. The latter is unlikely given the time and energy countries have invested in the U.N. system, and because they still value the baseline mandate they agreed to two years ago: to “end plastic pollution” by addressing the “full life cycle of plastics.” But a smaller group of signatories could still make a global impact by using import tariffs and other trade policies to indirectly influence plastic production in non-signatory nations.
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For oil and gas producers, plastic is a very important part of the industrial system. Significant amounts of what is extracted is not usable as fuel after refining. It would just have to be dumped or burned off, which would hurt margins, just throwing away 1/3rd of what you pull out of the ground.
The profitability and market viability of fossil fuels depends pretty heavily on plastics production as a way of profitably despising of byproducts. Take that away and they’re much less competitive with other energy sources.
Reducing fossil fuel extraction is something we need to do though. Regardless, the agreement is not talking about eliminating plastics completely but regulating their production. If you wanted to address what you described, couldn’t they regulate it so plastics are used for more durable things, like plastic lumber, car parts, furniture, etc. instead of all the endless disposable stuff?
No. As @megopie@beehaw.org already said, plastic production plays a major role in the fossil fuel game. We needed such an agreement as the first step, but Russia, SA, and others are blocking unfortunately.