Roadmap agreed for legally-binding global plastics treaty
A potential future treaty could – in theory – incorporate legally-binding limits on the production of plastic goods.
Delegates from around the world are meeting at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) 5.2 summit in Nairobi, Kenya, to try and get the ball rolling on a proposed global plastics treaty.
Representatives covering 50 countries – including all EU member states – are convening at UNEA, which takes place 28th February-2nd March, 2022. Discussions are focussed on agreeing a roadmap which would begin to tackle the problem of plastic pollution in the environment in a unified, international effort.
News agency Reuters reports it has now seen a draft resolution entitled “End plastic pollution: Towards an internationally legally binding instrument”. This is not the treaty itself, but rather a roadmap to agreeing one that is acceptable to all UN members. Of particular importance are the reports from Reuters that any potential treaty must address “the full lifecycle of plastic” – i.e., it cannot just focus on recycling and end-of-life plastics.
If talks are successful, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) aims to begin setting up an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), whose function would be to spend two years establishing a legally-binding global plastics treaty.
UNEP has said that in order for any new international policies to be effective, more needs to be done to understand ocean plastics. With 11 million tons of plastics entering the ocean each year, UNEP says that 2.7 million tons come from rivers. The UN is already operating projects in North America and South East Asia to monitor this river waste, gather data, and ultimately understand – and thus prevent – the transfer of waste plastic into rivers and streams.
However, an earlier analysis, also published by Reuters, suggests that a UN-wide treaty could see limits imposed on the amount of plastic countries can produce. While the plastics industry has often taken the stance that the infrastructure for recycling and re-use needs to be addressed as a priority above other measures, there was speculation going into the summit that the discussions in Nairobi would also seek to include the production and design of plastic – in particular single-use items – in the debate. This, according to Reuters, was a key sticking point, which the draft roadmap has now resolved – production and design are likely, it seems, to be addressed by the treaty, in addition to recycling and re-use.
Two major resolutions had been tabled initially – the Rwanda-Peru resolution, and the Japan resolution. The proposals overlapped on several points, but the key difference was that the Japan resolution aimed to focus on downstream re-processing measures, whereas the recommendations from Rwanda and Peru covered the entire lifecycle – and it seems that this latter approach is being adopted, based on the limited details of the draft agreement that have emerged so far.
According to the FT, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which counts ExxonMobil, Shell and Dow among its members, is reported to have ‘pushed back’ against the Rwanda-Peru resolution, preferring instead the proposals from Japan.
On the subject of the plastic and chemical industry’s concerns, Espen Barth Eide, president of UNEA, told Reuters: “This is not an anti-plastics treaty […] We are not sort of after their product as such, but we want to bring it into a much more viable, circular economy.”