A legally binding treaty on plastic production and waste could have major effects on ocean plastic pollution
For the past two years, nations have been trying to craft a legally binding global treaty that will tackle plastic pollution. The fast-tracked negotiation process is due to end with this month’s meeting, which is taking place in Busan, South Korea, from 25 November to 1 December.
Here, Dialogue Earth explores why this fifth meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution matters, why there has been so much conflict, and what to watch out for.
Why is a global treaty to curb plastic pollution needed?
Since 1950, global plastic production has increased over 200-fold to almost 460 million tonnes annually. Much of this has been driven by the rise of single-use plastic, which accounts for half of all production. But while production has rocketed, recycling has struggled to keep up; as of 2015, it had only dealt with 9% of all plastic waste ever produced.
Production could also double or triple by 2050, according to some projections. As plastic is made almost completely from fossil fuels, this kind of growth would consume approximately a quarter of the remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
A piece of plastic can last for decades. That, paired with growing production, has overwhelmed the world’s waste management infrastructure, with 19 million tonnes of plastic now leaking into the environment each year, killing and injuring wildlife. Plastic has been detected at the deepest point of the ocean in the Mariana Trench, and in freshly fallen Antarctic snow. It fragments into micro- and nano-sized particles and has entered human food, bloodstreams, placentas and breastmilk. Of the 16,000 known chemicals in everyday plastics, some 4,200 are harmful to human health or the environment, according to the one major review.
Recognising the threat this material poses to human and environmental health, in 2022 dozens of countries agreed to build a legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution – quickly.
Where are the plastics treaty talks at now?
The 2022 decision set a two-year treaty-drafting process in motion. This is now culminating in a fifth and final meeting of the INC.
At the previous four meetings, the INC’s task has been to pin down the elements a treaty could contain. These include possible measures to reduce plastic production; improve waste management; eliminate or minimise the most polluting and avoidable plastic products and most dangerous chemicals; design plastics for reuse; and finance cleanups and a global transition away from plastic.
Many of those involved hoped that by the fifth meeting, countries would have started to converge on key parts of the treaty. But difficult negotiations have meant the opposite: there has been striking divergence over several points, and with that, the text has ballooned to incorporate numerous options that reflect disparate views. Chunks of the draft are locked between more than 3,000 brackets, which signal disagreement over whether the enclosed words should be there at all. As one delegate put it at INC-4 in Ottawa earlier this year, the task is now to “break free from brackets”.
What are the big disagreements?
Countries have not yet even agreed how to agree. Multilateral environmental agreements have often been reached by consensus and, when that is not possible, negotiations have adopted rules dictating that countries can vote on contentious points. Since the start of the plastics treaty process, however, a small group of countries has opposed the voting option. Currently, that leaves no way for disagreements to be resolved. This may lead to a weak deal, to avoid disagreements blowing up the talks entirely.
Big areas of discord include which dangerous chemicals should be banned from plastic products and how countries will finance the obligations of any final deal. Almost 100 nations want a new multilateral fund that countries would pay into. But, according to Dennis Clare, a legal adviser for the Federated States of Micronesia, several developed countries (including the United Kingdom and the EU) argue this money should come from an existing environmental fund, like the Global Environment Facility.
By far the biggest point of tension is whether the treaty should include curbs on the amount of plastic the world makes. “This treaty is going to be assessed on the extent to which the world begins to limit plastic production and consumption to sustainable levels,” says Clare.
It is not all doom and gloom: countries are aligning on some issues, including the need for plastic waste management, recycling, and product redesigns. Special measures to regulate plastic fishing gear that plagues ocean life when lost or discarded appears to be another area of consensus.
Why is plastic production such a fraught issue?
All countries that entered the treaty process agreed on the need to end plastic pollution. The original mandate for the treaty stated it should address pollution by taking a “full-life-cycle approach”. Many countries, such as Rwanda, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ghana and the Federated States of Micronesia say this implicitly includes production and curbing it.
For these countries and some civil society groups, controlling production is essential to making the treaty a success.
“If you keep producing [more] plastics, you can fix as much waste management as you want, but you’re still going to be flooding plastics into an oversaturated market,” says Christina Dixon, ocean campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency.
Often, countries that support production curbs are themselves dealing with large amounts of plastic pollution, due to limited waste management systems, and because they also receive considerable waste imports from other countries.
Opposing countries argue that fossil fuels, petrochemicals and plastics manufacturing are important to their economies. Petrochemicals, from which plastics are made, are the primary driver of growth in oil demand. In line with this, some countries and industries appear to be accelerating the build-out of petrochemical plants. For countries with big fossil fuel industries, political commitments to cut plastic production pose a major economic risk.
More than any other issue, the production of plastic has divided INC participants.
Who are the key players in Busan?
Typically, countries that stand against production cuts are those with large fossil fuel industries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, who call themselves the “like-minded group” at the negotiations. These participants emphasise waste management as the main solution to plastic pollution.
While those countries are in the minority, their views are echoed by numerous lobbyists for the petrochemical and plastics industry, who have attended each INC in increasing numbers. Busan could be a strategic meeting place for them. “Asia is the key region for growth of the petrochemicals industry … Korea is also massively investing in the petrochemicals build-out”, says Delphine Levi Alvares, the global petrochemicals campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law.
On the other side, 40 nations and regional groups including the EU, Fiji, Switzerland and Nigeria have signed a declaration called the Bridge to Busan, which calls for “sustainable levels of production”.
One powerful national player on plastic production is the US. Despite not yet signing the Bridge to Busan, the country recently changed its stance and now supports production cuts. That is a significant move, because the US produces 17% of the world’s plastic, behind only China (the world’s largest manufacturer at 32%). This could be a “signal to other producers that we will be able to craft a way forward that doesn’t throw industry under the bus”, says Dixon.
Others to watch at INC-5 are Indigenous rights groups and waste pickers, who are impacted directly by plastic pollution and bring a human face to its effects.
Will there be a deal in South Korea?
Looking at the bloated, bracket-besieged document, some experts heading to the meeting say the six remaining days of negotiations in Busan will not be enough to reach an agreement. With this in mind, Luis Vayas Valdivieso (the Ecuadorian ambassador to the United Kingdom who is chairing the INC-5 process) has spent recent months engaging with countries to craft a streamlined version of the text. His aim is to create a kind of priority list for discussion in Busan, so a treaty can be agreed in South Korea, postponing some topics and technical details for follow-up meetings.
If countries cannot reach an agreement in Busan, this could trigger the extension of negotiations and another meeting in 2025. Of more pressing concern to some is that if countries cannot agree to the voting rules to resolve disputes, that may push them to exclude measures like production cuts, purely to establish an agreement.
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Those wanting an ambitious treaty are eager that production cuts remain on the table, because the text agreed in Busan will determine the treaty’s ultimate remit.
“It will be extremely challenging and take many years to add something on production retrospectively if there aren’t the requisite hooks in the treaty text,” says Dixon.
If countries do agree to a treaty by the end of the Busan meeting, it will be open for ratification by mid-2025.
