Worldwide talk turns to controlling plastics

What is supposed to be the last of five meetings to negotiate a global treaty on plastic pollution has started in Busan, South Korea. What the United Nations and delegates from over 175 member countries ultimately decide there will have large ramifications for the environment and the chemical industry.

Worldwide, humans produce over 350 million metric tons of plastic waste every year. “We must end plastic pollution before plastic pollution ends us,” Kim Wan-sup, South Korea’s minister of environment, said in his opening remarks.

The process of writing a treaty that deals with plastics began in March 2022, when the UN Environment Programme set out to create a legally binding global agreement by the end of 2024. What started as a conversation about cleaning up litter from beaches has bloomed into a huge and nuanced discussion of all aspects of plastics—from the chemicals that go into their synthesis to the microplastics into which they ultimately crumble.

All along, negotiations on what should be in the treaty have been contentious. The previous meeting, INC4, ended in May with a plan for work to be done during the summer on a bloated draft of the treaty text, which at the start of the Busan meeting still had over 3,000 notes requesting changes.

In late October, INC chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso released what’s called a nonpaper—a document intended to streamline the treaty draft—with the goal of moving negotiations along faster once INC5 started. Ahead of the meeting and into day one, the document was both applauded and condemned by nonprofits, industry organizations, and member states.

Vayas stressed during the opening plenary that the nonpaper was meant as a starting point for talks and that delegates would be able to add to it as the meeting went on, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, an independent reporting service.

One particularly contentious section in the nonpaper is article 6, which deals with the supply of plastics. Some member states fully support limiting the amount of plastic that is produced; others are staunchly opposed. Vayas doesn’t suggest specific text for this section but instead lists some goals for what it could include.

A few days before the meeting started, the US Environmental Protection Agency released the final version of the National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, which outlines actions that US government agencies, businesses, nonprofits, and communities could take to cut down on plastic pollution. The strategy doesn’t prescribe production limits but instead suggests steps such as identifying single-use plastics that agencies could stop using and setting voluntary goals to limit the production of single-use plastics.

The EPA released an initial draft of the document in April 2023; it garnered over 91,000 comments and criticism from both environmental and industry groups. The final report has drawn similar criticism.

In a statement, Ross Eisenberg, head of the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, says that the ACC supports aspects of the report, such as increasing recycling capacity, but warns that other parts could inadvertently send some plastics manufacturing overseas. “We urge the Administration to carefully consider the potential unintended consequences of policies that prescribe alternatives to plastics and appreciate the agency’s call for more data to better understand trade-offs,” Eisenberg says.

Frankie Orona, executive director of the Society of Native Nations, an advocacy group, says the EPA’s document fails to address the root causes of plastic pollution. “False solutions like recycling only look at single-use plastics, where the core problem is that the production of virgin plastics from fossil fuels and extraction is not a focus,” he says in a statement.