Plastics Treaty on Verge of Collapse as Objections Multiply, Industry Lobbyists Dominate

A legally binding global treaty to end plastics pollution was on the verge of collapse earlier this week, with some countries accused of blocking negotiations and driving the outcome toward a “lowest common denominator” on key issues like limits on plastic production.

“The final round of talks started in Geneva last Tuesday, after a collapse at the previous session in Busan [South Korea] last year when countries failed to bridge deep divisions,” The Independent reports. “The process, launched in 2022, aims to create a treaty covering the full life cycle of plastics, from production to disposal.”

In the previous round of negotiations in Ottawa in April 2024, the UN Environment Assembly’s call for an ambitious, “international legally binding instrument” had been eroded by a process dominated by lobbyists from the plastics and fossil fuel industries, observer delegate Suzanna Schofield wrote for The Energy Mix Weekender at the time.

“Rather than focusing the instrument on curbing plastic pollution, member states interpreted the resolution as a call for countries to create a legally binding instrument on effective waste management of plastic pollution,” Schofield said. “For youth delegates attending the conference, that was a deal-breaker. If this treaty fails to limit plastic pollution, fossil fuel companies will continue to profit from business as usual, from a plastics life cycle that has them extracting resources, emitting climate pollution, producing (literal) mountains of waste, and harming communities.”

That sense of betrayal has carried through to the latest, and final round of negotiations that opened in Geneva August 5.

“We’ve invested a lot into coming all the way to Geneva, away from our communities, away from our families, because we understand how important an issue this is and how crucial a moment this is,” said Juressa Lee, who was onsite representing the Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance in New Zealand. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime plastics treaty.”

But “to date the process has been broken,” said Break Free From Plastic spokesperson Brett Nadrich. “Civil society leaders from around the world, together with those most impacted, are speaking with a unified voice that we need to show courage, not compromise, and fix the process.”

“The elephant in the room is production,” Graham Forbes, global plastics campaign lead at Greenpeace USA, told The Independent. “If you want to end plastic pollution, you have to stop making so much plastic. It’s simple.”

200-Fold Growth in Production

As negotiations got under way, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet declared that a 200-fold increase in plastics production since the 1950s amounts to a $1.5-trillion-per-year health crisis hitting home from infancy to old age, The Guardian reported. That output is on track to triple again by 2060, to a billion tonnes per year.

“We know a great deal about the range and severity of the health and environmental impacts of plastic pollution,” lead author Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist at Boston College, told The Guardian. “The impacts fall most heavily on vulnerable populations, especially infants and children,” resulting in “huge economic costs to society. It is incumbent on us to act in response.”

“While plastic has many important uses, the most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use plastics, such as drinks bottles and fast food containers,” The Guardian writes, citing the Lancet review. And “plastics endanger people and the planet at every stage,” the UK-based paper adds, “from the extraction of the fossil fuels they were made from, to production, use and disposal. This results in air pollution, exposure to toxic chemicals, and infiltration of the body with microplastics. Plastic pollution can even boost disease-carrying mosquitoes, as water captured in littered plastic provides good breeding sites.”

Despite endless industry messaging to the contrary, less than 10% of plastic is recycled.

But as delegates gathered in Geneva, they learned that plastics and fossil lobbyists were flooding the negotiating rooms, just as they had in past rounds, with a record 234 of them registered to attend, according to the Center for International Environmental Law. The Trump administration weighed in as well, trying to strong-arm other countries into rejecting a global cap on plastics production.

That effort largely traces back to fossil fuels.

“Should the three-year-old talks fail, it will be a big setback for efforts to subdue a gathering environmental and health disaster—and a victory for many of the countries that have long resisted global climate action,” writes Financial Times columnist Pilita Clark. “Plastics are made from petrochemicals derived from fossil fuels. As the world shifts towards electric cars and other green technologies, petrochemicals are set to become the main driver of global oil demand growth from 2026 onwards.”

Which means there is “much at stake for oil- and gas-reliant economies in Geneva, where many countries understandably want a global cap on plastic production, as well as legally binding measures to phase out the most harmful plastic products and chemicals,” she adds.

“Oil-producing states might support long-term aims to cut production but I can’t see what’s in it for them to voluntarily agree to binding global caps,” an experienced observer of the talks told Clark.

The Times has details on the interests different countries bring to the negotiating table and the dynamics that are developing as a result.

‘Age of Telegrams and Typewriters’

For former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, now a self-described “business leader, climate and equalities campaigner” focused on the need to “operate within planetary boundaries and address systemic inequalities”, the result of the plastics talks will be a measure of whether the international treaty system is fit for purpose.

“This is more than a treaty negotiation,” he writes on LinkedIn. “It is a live test of whether today’s economic and multilateral systems can contain one of the fastest-growing threats to human and environmental health, or yet more proof that institutions built in the age of telegrams and typewriters are simply unfit for a world of cascading crises and collapsing timelines.”

So far, it isn’t going well. Even though plastic pollution “has metastasized into a global health emergency,” with “endocrine disruption, fertility loss, [and] microplastics lodged in placentas and lung tissue,” Polman says, the negotiations are getting more complicated, not less so.

“More than halfway through the talks, the draft text has swollen to nearly 1,500 bracketed sections, formal markers of disagreement, quadruple the number at the week’s start,” he writes. “Instead of closing gaps, negotiators are prising them wider.”

Although countries have options to cut plastics pollution 80% by 2040, “in Geneva, one group dominates,” he adds. “Fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists outnumber the combined delegations of all EU member states. A few corporations hold more seats at the table than the 450 million citizens those delegates represent. And oil-producing nations know how to work the system, exploiting consensus rules that let a tiny handful of vested interests veto protections for billions.”

That dynamic amounts to “a broken system, with procedure weaponized to prevent progress,” Polman concludes. “If the international system can’t deliver a meaningful agreement on something this urgent, this visible, and this overwhelmingly supported, something that is poisoning our air, food, and water, and infiltrating the lungs, blood, and developing brains of our children, then we have to ask: what, exactly, is it for?

Cover photo:  Nations gather in Geneva Aug. 5 to try to complete a landmark treaty aimed at ending the plastic pollution crisis. (Florian Fussstetter/ UNEP)