Plastic Pollution Talks Collapse as Oil States Oppose Tough Treaty

In the New York Times, a story notes that negotiations over a global plastic pollution treaty collapsed on Friday as countries failed to bridge wide gaps on whether the world should limit plastic manufacturing and restrict the use of harmful plastic chemicals.

Environmental groups accused a small number of petroleum-producing nations, which make the building blocks of plastic, of derailing an ambitious effort to tackle plastic waste. “We are leaving frustrated,” Edwin Josué Castellanos López, chief negotiator for Guatemala, told the delegates. “We have not come up with a treaty that the planet so urgently needs.”

It was unclear what next steps might follow the latest round of negotiations in Geneva which were supposed to be the last.

Environmentalists questioned how a consensus-based approach to negotiations, where decisions require unanimity, rather than a vote, could hope to break through deadlock. During the negations, delegates marked up the draft treaty text with almost 1,500 “brackets,” or parenthesis placed around text that has not yet been agreed upon.

The talks’ collapse “proved that there’s no way we can proceed with consensus,” said Bjorn Beeler, executive director at IPEN, an international network of nonprofits focused on addressing pollution. “The result was the chaos you saw.”

See the full story ici.