The world’s first plastics treaty is in crisis: can it be salvaged?

Hopes of securing a United Nations treaty on plastics pollution are fading after the final round of negotiations ended without an agreement.

Crucial negotiations on what would have been the first global agreement to limit plastics pollution collapsed in August amid acrimony and distrust. This week, hopes that an agreement might yet be reached suffered another blow when Luis Vayas Valdivieso, Ecuador’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, resigned as chair of the treaty’s intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC)

At the last INC meeting, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in August, negotiations ran long into the night, but ended without success. Once a new chair has been appointed, they will face the decision of whether to convene another INC meeting or bring the process to an end without a treaty. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) — the body overseeing negotiations — will address this question when it meets in Nairobi in December.

Nature spoke to Samuel Winton, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who is studying the treaty’s progress, about what went wrong, and what can be done to salvage a process that aims to end one of humanity’s biggest blights on the planet.

Why do we need a global treaty to end plastics pollution?

Plastic is a global supply chain, and we see frequently in policy that when interventions target a single part of a supply chain in a single country, their impact is minimal. For example, a plastic-bag ban, whether it’s successful or not, makes a relatively small impact. A global treaty gives countries the opportunity to work strategically together to take genuinely meaningful action. I am still convinced, despite the challenges of this process, that a plastics treaty is essential.

How significant is Vayas Valdivieso’s resignation?

It’s a very big deal. The role of the chair in these processes is crucial, because they set the work plan, they direct the discussions. Having a different person chairing the next meeting — assuming there is one — will have a big impact on how those talks progress.

What would be the best-case scenario now?

We have to be ambitious, but realistic. I don’t think it is realistic — and I’m not convinced it is necessary — to say we are going to cap plastic production at a certain level by a certain date. My ambition would be for there to be a globally enforced environment whereby, with the use of alternative business models or products, the market chooses to adopt those regardless of a ban on certain plastics. That could be regulations that encourage reuse and refill, or regulations that help businesses move to alternative models that reduce the amount of plastic that’s being used.

Have the negotiations achieved anything so far?

There has been a lot of progress among the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (a group of countries that includes the European Union, the United Kingdom and more than 50 other nations) in understanding where each other’s red lines are and how countries could work together. And we are seeing movement from countries like China to a more moderate position. But there are others, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia — the ‘like-minded group’ — whose positions haven’t moved at all.

When a process works on consensus and you have a few countries refusing to move on certain things, it becomes very difficult to make progress. Another barrier to progress is a lack of more strategic efforts to move the process forwards. The high-ambition coalition, for example, has stated that it is not a negotiating bloc. A genuine negotiating bloc could have helped to achieve more progress than we’ve seen.

Cover photo:  Global consumption of plastics is on the rise, but only a small percentage of plastic waste is recycled. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty