Plastic Pollution Talks Collapse as Oil States Oppose Tough Treaty

The New York Times reports that at the Plastics Treaty talks, 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.

“Some countries did not come here to finalize a text, they came here to do the opposite: block any attempt at advancing a viable treaty,” said David Azoulay of the Center for International Environmental Law, a legal advocacy group.

They also 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.”