Here’s what to watch for at this month’s global plastics treaty talks todayheadline

Negotiators from more than 170 countries are arriving in Geneva, Switzerland, this week to resume discussions over the United Nations plastics treaty, eight months after they missed their original deadline for finalizing the pact.

Many delegates, advocacy groups, and U.N. officials are hopeful that the 10-day session, running from Tuesday through August 14, will result in a final agreement that delivers on the U.N.’s objective to “end plastic pollution.” But progress has been slow at each of the five preceding sessions, in large part due to a consensus-based decision-making structure that has allowed oil-producing countries to obstruct progress.

While the U.N. Environment Programme is eager to conclude the negotiations, some delegates and environmental groups are worried that the pressure to agree to something will yield an unambitious treaty. They’re gearing up for a contentious week and a half, and preparing for the possibility of more deadlock — in which case negotiations could continue at yet another plastics treaty session, or at a separate, higher-level U.N. meeting that’s happening this December. 

For Chris Dixon, who has attended each of the plastics treaty negotiating sessions and is the oceans campaign leader for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, the discussions in Geneva will be a “real test” at a time of flagging confidence in multilateralism. “There’s currently a lot of investment in delivering this [treaty] within the U.N.,” she told Grist. “Can we still get countries around the world to commit to something really meaningful?”

Here’s how we got to where we are now, and what to watch for over the next 10 days.

Why the U.N. is negotiating a plastics treaty

The world is drowning in more plastic than it can manage. Since the material began to be mass produced in the 1950s, annual production has soared to some 460 million metric tons — roughly the weight of 1,400 Empire State Buildings — and is projected to triple by 2060 under business as usual.

Today, only 9 percent of plastic is recycled due to technical and economic limitations; the rest is sent to landfills and incinerators, or becomes litter in the environment. Plastic now permeates virtually all of the Earth’s landscapes, as well as human organs such as the brain, lungs, testicles, and ovaries. It’s associated with myriad health concerns, and — because it’s made from fossil fuels — it’s a major contributor to climate change.

“Plastics have so many egregious issues,” said Holly Kaufman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit World Resources Institute and co-founder of a research project on plastic’ contribution to climate change. She also noted the disproportionate pollution burden borne by people living near plastic manufacturing facilities, as well as plastic’s impacts on ecosystems and wildlife.

United Nations member states agreed in March 2022 to tackle the problem by negotiating an international, legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution,” and set a goal of finishing it by the end of 2024. Few foresaw how contentious the process would be. Over five rounds of scheduled talks, countries have repeatedly sparred over the scope of the treaty, including whether its mandate to address the “full life cycle” of plastics implies some sort of limit on how much plastic the world can create. 

A handful of fossil fuel-producing countries including Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia used the consensus-based decision-making process to their advantage, stalling the negotiations over their opposition to plastic production limits, while a much larger bloc of other nations expressed a desire for more “ambitious” provisions. By the fifth round of talks in Busan, South Korea, last December, negotiators were so far behind that there was little hope they would be able to finish the agreement on schedule. The U.N. agreed to schedule one more meeting in 2025, calling it “part two” of the fifth negotiating session. That’s what’s kicking off this week.

What’s being negotiated

At the end of the last round of talks, the chair of the treaty negotiating committee published a “chair’s text” meant to encapsulate the full range of proposals under discussion and serve as a starting point for further negotiations. On production limits — the issue that has divided treaty negotiations from the outset — the text offers two options. One, depending on how it’s worded, could set a “global target” to “reduce,” “maintain,” or “manage” the production of plastic, with the potential goal of reaching “sustainable levels” of “production and consumption.” The other option is no text at all, eliminating the article on plastic production altogether.

For green groups, a best-case scenario would be for the treaty to enshrine a global target directly — by requiring production to drop, say, 40 percent by 2040. Some countries might have to make deeper cuts, depending on their share of global plastic production and historical responsibility for plastic pollution, and each country would have to implement this goal through national legislation. Dixon said the window may have closed for such an agreement; it could be more realistic to push for the treaty to kick off a “target-setting process” that would unfold at annual meetings after the treaty is finalized.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, has attended each treaty negotiating session, as well as previous U.N. meetings on plastic pollution starting in 2018. He isn’t expecting much progress on production limits either, saying the conversation on the topic hasn’t “matured” in the same way it has for other priority areas, particularly chemicals and their impacts on human health. Since treaty negotiations began, researchers have identified more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastic products, 4,200 of which are known to have hazardous properties. Most of the other chemicals have never been assessed for toxicity. 

At the end of the Busan talks, 94 countries signed a declaration calling for the treaty to include legally binding phaseouts of “the most harmful plastic products and chemicals of concern in plastics.” A coalition of scientists advocating for an “effective” plastics treaty favor treaty regulations based on broad chemical classes, with a streamlined process to regulate more chemicals over time. The chair’s text, however, currently lists just seven chemicals for phaseout, and only in specific products. It also lists seven types of single-use plastic products like straws and cutlery, and does not mention particular polymers — polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for instance — that are more likely to leach hazardous chemicals. Enforcing a phaseout of selected chemicals would likely be up to individual countries.

Other, less controversial parts of the chair’s text aim to create better waste management systems; improve the “durability, reusability, refillability, refurbishability, repairability, and recyclability of plastic products”; clean up existing plastic pollution; and foster a “just transition” for waste pickers and other workers who may be impacted by the implementation of the plastics treaty. Several of its objectives, like preventing the release of microplastics into the environment, could also protect human health, since exposure to these tiny plastic fragments is linked to heart attacks, stroke, and chronic degenerative diseases, among other conditions.

The U.N. resolution for the plastics treaty acknowledges that it may create expensive legal obligations, especially for poorer developing countries — these countries may not have enough money to create more robust waste management systems and replace the plastic they buy with costlier alternatives. Negotiators have been considering how to create a mechanism that would ease this burden, either by standing up a new multilateral fund, drawing from an existing one, or designing some combination of the two. They’re also deliberating on whether and how to differentiate countries’ financial responsibilities based on their wealth and historic contribution to the plastic pollution crisis. The chair’s text on this topic is heavily bracketed, meaning little of it is set in stone, although a widely supported proposal that African, Latin American, and small island countries released last year suggests that most delegates favor a new fund with mandatory contributions from the most developed countries.

Other financial proposals include a tax on plastic manufacturing and the elimination of plastic production subsidies, although these measures face long odds in Geneva due to opposition from industry groups and oil-producing states.

Rules of procedure and the specter of no agreement

More mundane, although perhaps more important, than any of the substantive issues up for discussion in Geneva is the way negotiators make decisions. So far, procedural rules that encourage consensus-based decision-making have made it possible for oil-producing countries to stand in the way of progress when confronted with proposals they dislike. This dynamic will likely continue unless negotiators adopt “rules of procedure” that allow for voting. 

“It doesn’t matter if we’ve got 11 days or 11,000 days,” Beeler said. Without the possibility of a vote hanging over delegates, “it’s just going to be a perpetual discussion.” He said that Geneva would be a victory even if new rules of procedure were its only outcome, because “then you’ve cleared up the mechanism to actually negotiate” at a future date. Beeler and other observers would rather end the Geneva talks with no treaty rather than one that’s been watered down just to accommodate an August 14 deadline.

If negotiators leave Geneva without an agreement, the next official opportunity for them to engage in plastics treaty diplomacy will likely be at the U.N. Environment Assembly’s next convening in Nairobi, Kenya, in December. That forum allows voting — a double-edged sword. Countries that want an ambitious treaty could use the meeting to break the logjam around issues like production limits and chemicals of concern — but oil-producing states could also introduce a proposal to rewrite the treaty mandate originally agreed on in 2022, striking language around the “full life cycle” of plastics and perhaps reorienting it around waste management. 

Some environmental groups have suggested that, if the talks in Geneva go poorly,  high-ambition countries could drop out of the treaty altogether and negotiate their own agreement outside the U.N.’s purview. There is precedent for this, notably in a 1997 multilateral agreement to ban landmines that Canada spearheaded after countries couldn’t agree to do so within the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. But others say this is unrealistic, given countries’ commitment to the plastics treaty process and the logistical difficulties of trying to start anew.

Whether or not negotiators finalize the treaty this month, Beeler emphasized that the hard work of enacting and enforcing its provisions will take many years. These negotiating sessions are “a warmup for a marathon,” he said. “The global fossil fuel-plastic-chemical economy is massive, and to address it and make any changes does not happen overnight.”