UN plastics treaty talks fall apart once again

A story in Chemical & Engineering News notes that after 10 days of increasingly agitated deliberations, what was supposed to be the end of multilateral negotiations to create a global plastics treaty once again ended with no treaty, little progress toward one, and many raised tempers. As negotiations in closed-door meetings continued throughout the last scheduled day of the meeting and resumed the next morning, discussions broke down just before dawn on Friday, Aug. 15. Around 9:00 a.m. Geneva time, the meeting chair ended the talks by saying that negotiations would continue at a future date to be announced.

As in past meetings, negotiations ultimately broke down over the same contentious issues—limits on plastic production, when plastic becomes waste, and banning toxic chemicals in plastic.

The treaty isn’t dead, says Bjorn Beeler, international coordinator at the advocacy group International Pollutants Elimination Network. “It’s on pause right now to figure out the next move.” But continuing the way that the plastics treaty talks have been going is not going to work, he says. “We cannot go on like this. Nobody wants to deal with this process the way that it is,” he says.

Despite the overall failure to reach agreement on a final text for the treaty, there was some small progress at the meeting. A joint proposal from Switzerland and Mexico on how to regulate chemicals of concern in plastics gained support as the talks went on. At the start of INC-5.2, the proposal had been signed by 65 countries. At the end, that number grew to 90. “So there was consistent growth,” Beeler says. That momentum is a signal that more and more countries are recognizing that the chemical components of plastic need to be regulated because of their effect on human health and the environment, he says.

Read the full story here.