What will it take to get drastic on plastic?

Hopes for a legally-binding global treaty to tackle the world’s plastic pollution crisis have been dashed by the collapse of the latest round of UN negotiations in Geneva. But with 234 petrochemical lobbyists among the delegates, weren’t these talks always doomed to failure? And could it be time for countries that genuinely want action on plastics to side-step the world’s petrostates and enact their own treaty? Sustainable investment professional and Lewes resident Richard Tyszkiewicz looks at what went wrong and what could happen now.

One of the common definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. After the failure in August of the global plastics treaty negotiations at  INC 5.2 in Geneva, which followed the remarkably similar failures of INCs 1 to 5, what should we conclude?

If ever an acronym was needed, the global plastic treaty negotiation process is it. INC 5.2 refers to the second part of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international, legally-binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.  Having finally realised the scale and sheer horror of the plastic waste crisis, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) kicked off the INC process in 2022 in Uruguay with the aim of achieving a Paris Climate Agreement-style treaty by the fifth session to be held in Busan in the Republic of Korea at the end of 2024.

Unfortunately, UNEP was also under the impression that a consensus decision could be achieved on the topic. Ninety-nine percent of plastics are made from petrochemical feedstocks. Fossil fuel-producing nations and large oil and gas companies are becoming well aware that their dominant days are numbered when it comes to sectors like transport and energy. That is why they are betting the farm on plastics. According to the OECD, based on current trends annual plastics production, use and waste generation are projected to increase by 70% in 2040 compared to 2020. Given that 435 million tonnes of raw plastic was produced in 2020, of which only an average of 9% is recycled, the plastic pollution crisis is heading for disaster.

The petrochemical sector has been conducting a coordinated campaign of greenwashing, disinformation, and aggressive lobbying. How UNEP expected the world’s petrostates to sign up to an effective plastics treaty is a mystery. The science is very simple: we produce far more plastic than waste management and recycling can ever be expected to handle. The only plausible solution involves reducing production and consumption. 

The plastics industry, on the other hand, will not consider any output reductions and only proposes downstream waste management measures. The sector is keen to promote unproven chemical – or ‘advanced’ – recycling and has hijacked the term ‘circularity’ as part of its marketing efforts. While recycling remains entirely necessary, any improvements to the global 9% average recycling rate will be unable to keep up with the expected growth in raw plastic production.

Plastics industry ‘smoke and mirror’ tactics

A perfect example of the plastics producers’ obfuscation on the waste crisis can be found whenever the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) publishes its annual ‘impact report.’ Despite the name, the AEPW is the plastics industry, and tends to present its impact metrics without context. For example, one of the headline statistics in the 2024 report is the following:

‘Cumulative Impact since 2019: 239,985 tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste reduced.’

This sounds impressive until you realise that, based on OECD numbers, a conservative estimate indicates that 2.25 billion tonnes of plastic were produced between 2019 and 2024. Therefore, over this five-year period, the combined might of the global petrochemical industry managed to reduce plastic waste through AEPW-funded projects by a meagre 0.0106%.

Meanwhile, at INC 5.2 the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) identified 234 petrochemical lobbyists among the delegates.  They clearly worked the room efficiently as the final plastics treaty text made no reference to production caps and appeared tailor-made for plastics industry interests. The issue of the thousands of toxic chemicals used in plastic production was also conveniently bypassed. The petrochemical industry is ultimately not going to support a consensus decision to curb its own output.  International non-governmental organisations have been calling for majority voting to be applied in the INC process, otherwise petrostates can effectively veto any measures they consider against their interests.

But isn’t any kind of global plastics treaty better than nothing? The answer from the overwhelming majority of high-ambition countries as well as civil society organisations has been a resounding ‘No’. Following the latest collapse, the INC 5.2 Chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso announced plans for an INC 5.3 at some later date but so far there has not been much enthusiasm for a repeat event.

What to expect following the collapse of the treaty talks

The INC process failed largely due to the interventions of a small number of petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and the United States. The European Union, United Kingdom and more than 100 other nations had high ambitions for an effective global plastics treaty. Some of these countries have come together in a High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (HAC) and may well decide to proceed with their own treaty outside of the UN-sponsored process unless there is a shift to majority voting.

This strategy can potentially work.  The Ottawa Convention on Landmines has been quite effective despite the initial UN process having failed to achieve consensus in the late 1990s, with a group of nations ultimately going it alone. If the high-ambition countries can begin reducing their consumption of plastics through their own treaty, the petrostates will see their market shrink whether they like it or not. It could be a large-scale example of consumer power, of which there are some compelling success stories. Amazon’s dramatic reduction in plastic packaging waste is reportedly the result of many years of persistent engagement by institutional shareholders.

According to David Azoulay, the CIEL head of delegation at INC 5.2: “We need a restart, not a repeat. Countries must escape the tyranny of the consensus we have seen here by reforming it – or forming a treaty of the willing. The world needs less plastic. The science knows it, people know it, doctors know it, and the markets know it. Together, we will continue to rise and push everywhere, until countries deliver the global treaty that the world needs and deserves.”