Negotiations over a global plastic pollution treaty collapsed on Friday as countries failed to bridge wide gaps on whether the world should limit plastic manufacturing and restrict the use of harmful plastic chemicals.
Environmental groups accused a small number of petroleum-producing nations, which make the building blocks of plastic, of derailing an ambitious effort to tackle plastic waste. “We are leaving frustrated,” Edwin Josué Castellanos López, chief negotiator for Guatemala, told the delegates. “We have not come up with a treaty that the planet so urgently needs.”
It was unclear what next steps might follow the latest round of negotiations in Geneva. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which is hosting the talks, said countries needed time to regroup after failing to reach consensus over draft treaty texts.
“This work will not stop, because plastic pollution will not stop,” she said. “People want a deal.”
Work toward a global treaty began in 2022 after nations agreed to begin writing a broad and legally binding agreement that would restrict the rapid growth of plastic pollution.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that, without global action to curb plastic pollution, plastic production will grow by 70 percent between 2020 and 2040, totaling 736 million tons a year by the end of that period. Overall as of 2020, less than 10 percent of global plastic waste was estimated to have been recycled, with the rest disposed of in landfills, incinerated or released into the environment.
A coalition of nations had aimed not only to improve recycling and clean up the world’s plastic waste, but curb plastics production. That would put measures like a ban on single-use plastics, a major driver of waste, on the table, some said at the tim. A group of nations also pushed for the treaty to include controls on toxic chemicals in plastic products.
Those efforts ran into opposition from oil-and-gas-producing nations that make the chemical building blocks of plastic, who argued for a treaty that more narrowly targeted waste management. They also argued the measures unfairly targeted crucial industries.
“The U.A.E. would like to see at the end of our work a global comprehensive and holistic treaty that unites rather than divides, that supports countries, and does not tie their hands or limit their capacities,” said Sulaiman Shaheen Mohamed Abdalla, a delegate for the United Arab Emirates.
The United States, which supported the idea of a broad treaty under the Biden administration, has now turned against production caps, proposing in the most recent round to strike a mention to addressing “the full life cycle of plastics” from the treaty.
Environmental groups accused oil-producing nations of thwarting the talks. “Some countries did not come here to finalize a text, they came here to do the opposite: block any attempt at advancing a viable treaty,” said David Azoulay of the Center for International Environmental Law, a legal advocacy group.
They also questioned how a consensus-based approach to negotiations, where decisions require unanimity, rather than a vote, could hope to break through deadlock. During the negations, delegates marked up the draft treaty text with almost 1,500 “brackets,” or parenthesis placed around text that has not yet been agreed upon.
The talks’ collapse “proved that there’s no way we can proceed with consensus,” said Bjorn Beeler, executive director at IPEN, an international network of nonprofits focused on addressing pollution. “The result was the chaos you saw.”
Marco Mensink of the Global Partners for Plastics Circularity, an industry group, also called the failure to conclude a treaty “a missed opportunity.” He said, “our global coalition of plastics and chemical manufacturers remains committed to supporting a treaty that keeps plastics in the economy and out of the environment.”