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Pollution

Plastic pollution treaty will drag on this year

Future meetings may see less engagement by the US government

by Leigh Krietsch Boerner
January 10, 2025 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 103, Issue 1

 

Plastic litter covers the ground around a river by a highway overpass.
Credit: Shutterstock
A UN treaty to address plastic pollution has fallen behind schedule.

Takeaways

Negotiations on the UN plastic treaty will continue this year, but the date and location are still not set.

The reelection of Donald J. Trump complicates US involvement in the plastics treaty.

Plastic pollution is still a big topic in 2025 and one that’s not as close to being resolved as many people had hoped it would be.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution—an effort to create a legally binding agreement to manage the over 350 million metric tons of plastic waste we create every year—failed to finish by the end of 2024 as scheduled. Delegates moved the treaty forward in their final meeting of the year but, as in earlier gatherings, hit a stalemate over plastic production caps and the regulation of chemicals of concern in plastics. The committee agreed to continue to work on the treaty text at an as-yet-unscheduled meeting in 2025.

Further complicating the plastic pollution issue is that the US presidency is turning over, and the incoming administration is less likely to regulate plastic pollution. Joe Biden has been in office for all plastic treaty negotiations; the Trump administration will probably send representatives who may have a different agenda—or not send representatives at all.

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During his first term in office, Donald J. Trump rolled back existing environmental protections and pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, which is a pledge by UN member states to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In Trump’s previous administration, the US did not officially engage in international environmental agreements, Shane Trimmer, the legislative director for US Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), said at a seminar on international plastic law in December.

“In that vacuum, states, local governments, and Senate delegations showed up at international meetings,” Trimmer said. He expects that smaller government entities will again step into these roles in the absence of federal action. Many of the policies to curb plastic pollution in the US, such as plastic bag bans, have been implemented at the state and local level anyway, he said.

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