UN plastics treaty trips at finish line

Negotiators walked away from the last scheduled meeting to negotiate the United Nations plastics pollution treaty in Busan, South Korea, on Dec. 1 without a finished agreement, a date for the next meeting, or a plan for work before the next session happens.

The outcome has left many participants disappointed but not really surprised.

The lack of a finished text for the treaty to end plastic pollution is unfortunate, Chris Jahn, council secretary of the International Council of Chemical Associations and president of the industry group the American Chemistry Council, says in a statement. But “this outcome underscores the complexity of addressing plastic pollution on a global scale and the need for further deliberations to achieve an effective, inclusive and workable treaty.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the advocacy group Society of Native Nations, says the current draft is less ambitious than he had hoped. “The treaty where it is now has left out those that are most impacted,” he says. But Orona says there’s still a chance to create a strong treaty at the upcoming continued session, to be called INC–5.2.

The original plan laid out by the UN Environment Programme in 2022 was to create a legally binding agreement by the end of 2024. The meeting in Busan was the fifth of five scheduled meetings to negotiate the treaty over 2 years. Ambiguity, contention, and slow progress have been the norm since the first meeting, INC–1, held in late 2022.

As recently as INC–4, which ended this May, no first draft of the text had been produced. Instead, there was a zero draft, a preliminary version with over 70 pages and more than 3,000 notes requesting changes.

INC chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso released a document in late October intended to streamline the draft process. He stressed at the start of the Busan meeting that the document was a jumping-off point for negotiations and that delegates should amend it throughout the week. Vayas issued two more versions of the document that accounted for the revisions. In the closing plenary session, he said that the most recent version, released earlier that day, should be considered “completely in brackets”—meaning that everything in it is still up for debate.

This last session ended at 2:50 a.m. KST on Dec. 2. Shortly before adjourning, delegates agreed to use the last document as the start of negotiations at the next session. The date and location of that session are yet to be determined.

From the beginning, participants were calling the timeline for the negotiations ambitious.“The plastics treaty deadline was super, super short,” says Maria Ivanova, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University. “I know of no other treaty that only had 2 years to finish negotiations.” Negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture took 7 years. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification took 11 sessions over 4 years. Further compressing the timeline, the organizers allotted only 5 weeks for negotiations—one week during each INC meeting.

As in prior sessions, delegates at INC–5 were at an impasse over familiar points of contention: production caps on and chemicals of concern in plastics.

Oil-producing member states, including Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, have joined forces to oppose production caps. Speaking on behalf of the group at the closing plenary, a delegate from Kuwait said, “We reiterate that the objective of this treaty is to end plastic pollution—not plastic itself.”

Meanwhile, Rwanda, Panama, and México put forth statements and proposals demanding a legally binding treaty that includes the elimination of certain plastic products and chemicals of concern, and a target to reduce production. As many as 100-plus member states supported those countries’ various proposals.

Martin Wagner, a biologist at Norwegian University of Science and Technology and a member of the Food Packaging Forum Foundation group at INC-5, said the 70–plus scientists there had hoped that the scientific evidence on chemicals of concern would prevail.

“The current version again contains many brackets and will be difficult to negotiate in the extension of INC–5,” Wagner says. But some proposals do mention specific products and chemicals that he thinks should be banned. “While this is less than what is needed to protect human health from the impacts of plastic chemicals, I hope countries will be able to agree on these rules instead of voluntary national measures as suggested by other countries,” Wagner says.

Another obstacle to completing a treaty is how the participants agreed to agree on the text. They decided to use consensus—which in UN terms means that all member states have to sign off on the text before it can move forward. Generally, member states vote on issues and a two-thirds majority decides. But the states spent so much time at the first two meetings debating how to agree that then-INC chair Gustavo Meza–Cuadra Velásquez instituted a provisional agreement on consensusin order to move forward.

But not everyone agrees that this is the best approach. Bjorn Beeler, international coordinator at the advocacy group International Pollutants Elimination Network, calls it “a broken process.” And Orona of the Society of Native Nations says, “We need to have some process changes in order to make 5.2 meaningful.” There is a chance to make that happen, but it will be challenging, he says.

Beeler also has hope. “We’re two INCs behind, but now we have a structure,” he says, referring to the most recent document. “It’s OK if it takes one to two more years to get it right. But if you get it wrong, it would be a tragedy.”