Negotiators are gathering in Busan, South Korea, this week in a final push to forge a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution.
“We must end plastic pollution before plastic pollution ends us,” Kim Wan-sup, South Korea’s minister of environment, said during the opening session on Monday.
Led by Norway and Rwanda, 66 countries plus the European Union say they want to address the total amount of plastic on Earth by controlling its design, production, consumption and disposal.
Several countries, including island nations hard-hit by plastic pollution, are pushing for a more ambitious agreement that addresses unchecked growth in the production of plastics, most of which are made from fossil fuels.
But oil and plastic-producing countries and companies want the agreement to focus more on recycling measures, even though less than 10 percent of the 400 million tonnes of plastic produced every year is currently recycled, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
That leaves hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic that can end up in landfill or incinerators, or in natural environments anywhere from the deep sea to the peaks of Mount Everest.
‘You can’t recycle your way out of this problem’
The Pacific island nation of Micronesia is helping to lead an initiative, called the Bridge to Busan, that recognises that the “full lifecycle of plastics includes the production of primary plastic polymers”.
Island nations, like Micronesia, are grappling with vast amounts of other countries’ plastic waste washing up on their shores alongside the effects of climate change, which the plastics industry also contributes to. According to an analysis by Carbon Brief, plastics currently cause more than three times the greenhouse gas emissions of aviation.
“We think it’s the heart of the treaty, to go upstream and to get to the problem at its source,” said Dennis Clare, legal adviser and plastics negotiator for Micronesia.
“There’s a tagline: ‘You can’t recycle your way out of this problem.'”
On the other side are countries, largely oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia, who want a downstream focus on waste alone.
“The reality is that many countries do not see themselves represented in this paper,” warned Saudi Arabia’s Abdelrahman Al Gwaiz, a senior advisor to the Ministry of Energy, speaking on behalf of the Arab group.
Key to any accord will be China and the United States, neither of which have openly sided with either bloc.
Earlier this year, Washington raised hopes among environmentalists by signalling support for some limits on production, a position that is reportedly now being rowed back.
Advocates for a more ambitious agreement are also concerned that companies that produce plastics have been influencing talks.
A recent investigation by Greenpeace found that the members of one industry-led initiative, known as the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, have produced 1,000 times more plastic than the scheme cleaned up, despite an investment of $1.5bn since 2019.
The initiative’s members included major oil and chemical companies from across the plastics supply chain, including oil giants ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, which produce the base chemicals used in plastic packaging and other products, Greenpeace said.
The alliance was launched by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a major plastics trade association, to “change the conversation – away from short-term simplistic bans of plastic”. It has held a “significant presence” in UN global plastics treaty talks, according to Greenpeace.
The fifth and final session of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution is expected to conclude on Saturday.
Opening the meeting on Monday, the Ecuadorian diplomat chairing the talks warned nations that the conference was about “far more than drafting an international treaty”.
“It is about humanity rising to meet an existential challenge,” Luis Vayas Valdivieso said.
