To tackle what’s been called the plastic “epidemic,” the UN spun up a committee in 2022 tasked with brokering a legally binding global agreement. This ambitious treaty between UN member states was to address the full life cycle of plastics, from production to disposal: In short, define what counts as plastic pollution and curb the sorts of unchecked production that inevitably leads to it. But across five sessions since, countries have failed to reach a consensus on the text.
What was meant to be the final session ended last year in Busan, South Korea without agreement, and representatives from 175 countries are now set to meet again for part two, this time in Geneva, Switzerland. INC-5.2 will take place from August 5 to 14, during which negotiators will attempt to see eye-to-eye on the points of the draft treaty that have thus far proven most contentious. According to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), there are over 370 such points.
Scope
Production, the use of chemicals of concern (those considered to be a risk due to toxicity and/or other qualities), product design and the financing of treaty implementation are some of the main points of disagreement. These issues have left countries in a deadlock, according to Cate Bonacini, Communications Manager for CIEL. There are countries that argue health should be excluded from the treaty’s scope. These topics will be front-and-center going back into the talks, and UN member states have spent the last eight months “working hard in closed-door meetings to find points of agreement,” Bonacini said in an email. “We’ll see the fruits of that labor soon.”
“At the heart of the issue,” Bonacini said, “there is a large disagreement about what plastic pollution is, and what measures are needed to end plastic pollution.” While the commitment focuses on the full life cycle of plastics, there’s been much dispute over where that cycle really begins.
“As scientists, we interpret the full life cycle as starting with extraction and production,” said Bethanie Carney Almroth, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Gothenburg and a member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. “That would be fossil fuels and raw plastic production all the way through to product, to use, to trade, to transportation, to waste management, mismanagement and environmental pollution, including remediation of existing legacy plastics. All of it.”
While over 100 countries last December were in favor of a treaty that would impose production limits, others including Saudi Arabia and Russia opposed the caps. Ahead of that session, the US reportedly also made the decision not to support production caps, despite earlier indications that it would. Unsurprisingly, the countries that have taken issue with the scope of the treaty are also some of the world’s top oil producers.
“There are other actors,” Carney Almroth said, “that are trying to narrow that scope to go from plastic products, like water bottles, to waste management, so sort of excluding the outer boundaries of how we define the plastics life cycle so that it would, in essence, become more of a waste management treaty.”
Outside influence
In addition to representatives from the participating member states, scientists, environmental organizations and industry lobbyists are present for the negotiation sessions. According to Carney Almroth, who has attended every Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) meeting and is now in Geneva for INC-5.2, increasingly it’s been lobbyists who take up the most space.
“At the last round of talks, lobbyists for the petrochemical and plastics industries made up the single largest delegation,” wrote Bangor University lecturer Winnie Courtene-Jones, who is also a member of the Coalition, in a recent article for The Conversation. CIEL found that “there were three times more fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists than scientists” at the Busan meetings. Bonacini noted that “plastics are 99 percent fossil fuels, and these companies have a vested interest in continuing to generate fossil fuel-based products, including plastics.”
Their influence has played a big role in the stalemate. They “have a lot of power, money and influence,” Carney Almroth said, “and their lobbying efforts go beyond the walls of the negotiating space…They have access to decision makers in ways that other observers do not.”
“They don’t want to look at chemicals,” Carney Almroth said. “They don’t want to look at production.” But the science indicates that looking at chemicals (additives, processing aids, etc.) and production is of utmost importance, not only in the context of environmental sustainability but also human health.
In an editorial for the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in July, a group of scientists pointed to the numerous potential health effects that recent studies have linked to plastics, via exposure to hazardous chemicals and from micro- and nanoplastics. That includes an increased risk of “multiple chronic diseases, including cancer, neurodevelopmental harm and infertility” as well as “respiratory, reproductive and gastrointestinal harm, with potential links to lung and colon cancer.”
The authors called on delegates to prioritize these concerns in the upcoming negotiations and work toward a treaty that would end production of toxic chemicals in plastics, ban the recycling of plastics containing those chemicals and reduce plastic production overall. Their letter comes alongside a separate study published this summer in the journal Nature that identified over 4,200 chemicals of concern in plastics, out of the 16,325 total known plastic chemicals. The researchers argue that, on top of establishing transparency around the makeup of plastics and removing chemicals of concern, plastics must be simplified if they’re going to be made safer.
The many chemicals that go into plastics “can be released throughout the entire plastic life cycle, from feedstock extraction and production to use and waste,” the authors write. “Specific end-of-life treatments, such as uncontrolled landfilling or incineration, can further exacerbate chemical releases.” The UN has warned that the negative effects at every stage in the life cycle of plastics disproportionately harm vulnerable populations worldwide, including indigenous peoples, low income families and rural communities.
Where things stand
Today, plastic is more or less inescapable — microplastics can even be found in Antarctica now. And research increasingly suggests we aren’t fully aware of how bad pollution levels really are.
Global plastic production has more than doubled in the last 25 years, with upwards of 450 million metric tons now estimated to be produced annually. Recycled plastics make up just 6 percent of that total, a figure that’s expected to stay the same even as global plastic use and waste generation are projected to rise 70 percent by 2040, according to the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And each year, tens of millions of tons of plastic waste is disposed of in ways considered to be environmentally unsound, ending up in uncontrolled dumpsites, burned openly or accumulating on land and in bodies of water.
A study published this summer, led by researchers from Utrecht University and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, found that there may be far more plastic in the oceans than previously thought when accounting for particles even smaller than microplastics. The team collected water samples from 12 locations across the North Atlantic Ocean and measured the concentration of nanoplastics (plastic particles under 1 micrometer) at different depths. By the researchers’ estimate, there could be as much as 27 million metric tons of nanoplastic in the North Atlantic alone. That’s in the ballpark of previous global estimates for larger plastic waste across all of the ocean.
In another new study, researchers from France’s University of Toulouse found we may be breathing in up to 100 times more microplastic particles indoors than previous estimates, based on measurements of airborne microplastics in the researchers’ own apartments and car cabins.
The situation is urgent, especially for vulnerable populations, said Carney Almroth. “The amounts of plastics we’re producing today and the amount of plastic in the environment are astronomical,” said Carney Almroth. As of a few years ago, “we had twice the mass of plastic on the planet as the mass of all the animals on land, in water, including insects, and we have produced far more plastic since then.”
Plastics are “overwhelming any and all of our waste management infrastructure, so we are not able to prevent pollution. We’re not able to mitigate harm,” Carney Almroth said. “The impacts of plastics in the environment are very large scale, to the point where they’re destabilizing vital Earth functions like climate, like nutrient cycling, like biodiversity. And then we have the human health impacts on top of that. It’s an acute problem.”
The logistics of averting catastrophe
But, as the past five sessions have illustrated, reaching an agreement on how to solve that problem isn’t going to be easy. The trouble, in part, boils down to how the decisions are being made. So far, it’s all being done by consensus rather than voting, Carney Almroth and Bonacini explained. That approach allows “a single country veto power over decisions,” Bonacini said.
Petrochemical countries including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, India and Brazil have reportedly latched onto this, using “obstructionist tactics” to drag out the negotiations. Some have insisted “without legal basis,” according to CIEL, “that decisions can only be made by consensus.” Consensus, however, isn’t the only option.
The draft Rules of Procedure allow for majority voting in the event a consensus can’t be reached, but whether that will happen is yet to be seen. “There are opportunities to force that rule,” Carney Almroth said. But, a country (or countries) would have to step up and invoke it.
At this stage of the negotiations, there is a risk that countries will compromise on key provisions for time’s sake, Bonacini said, which would ultimately weaken the treaty. And once a treaty is finalized, “it can take years, if not decades, to make amendments to the original text,” so getting it right the first time is crucial. International agreements that have taken a softer approach to addressing environmental issues, like the Paris Agreement — which lets countries set their own targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — have been criticized for being insufficient in the face of rapidly rising global temperatures and climate change.
In June at the UN Ocean Conference, representatives for 95 countries that are part of the INC reaffirmed their commitment to a treaty that addresses the full life cycle of plastics, phases out “the most problematic plastic products and chemicals of concern,” improves product design to reduce environmental and health impacts and employs effective means of implementation. “A treaty that lacks these elements, only relies on voluntary measures or does not address the full lifecycle of plastics will not be effective to deal with the challenge of plastic pollution,” the group — which includes Canada, Australia, Colombia, Zimbabwe, the UK and Germany — wrote in a joint statement. These countries added that “the treaty should provide for the possibility of decision-making, through regular UN procedures if all efforts to reach consensus have been exhausted.”
If an agreement isn’t reached this time around, there are a number of ways the next steps could play out. The talks could be stretched even further into another meeting, or countries could decide to take the matter somewhere else.
“Many countries are considering alternatives if negotiations fail,” Christina Dixon, Ocean Campaign Lead for the Environmental Investigation Agency told Mongabay. “Options include returning to the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) to establish a new expanding mandate, creating a convention outside the UN for committed countries to move forward or adopting a protocol under an existing convention.” The UNEA meets next in December.
We are, as Courtene-Jones wrote in The Conversation, at “a critical crossroads.” That’s something advocates for a strong, science-based treaty all seem to agree on. “There are a lot of places where we can really do a lot to make a difference, and make things better,” said Carney Almroth. “Countries need to be ambitious, and need to stand up and demand this.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/will-the-un-finally-broker-a-treaty-to-end-plastic-pollution-130022025.html?src=rss
