Plastic pollution is toxic and everywhere. Now, legal experts say it’s a human rights violation. todayheadline

Plastics don’t just pose a threat to the marine environment and people’s health; they jeopardize basic human rights. This is the framing that a growing number of legal experts, policymakers, and environmental groups are using in conversations about a proposed United Nations treaty to “end plastic pollution,” which is undergoing another round of negotiations this week in Geneva. 

The draft of the treaty that negotiators began working on last week mentioned human rights at least twice. But the text didn’t go far enough, according to legal experts, and now, at the second part of the fifth round of treaty talks — running from August 5 to 14 — there’s been a push among civil society and some negotiators to place a stronger emphasis on human rights in order to justify specific policies, such as a limit on global plastic production. 

It wasn’t until recently that experts began referring to the plastics problem explicitly in human rights terms. A primary turning point was a 2021 report from the United Nations’ special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Marcos Orellana. Over 24 pages, Orellana described how plastics threaten human rights at every stage of their life cycle, from the extraction of oil and gas to plastics’ production, use, and disposal — largely through widespread chemical and microplastics contamination.

The situation had gotten so bad, Orellana wrote, that “the ability of future generations to enjoy a toxic-free environment conducive to a life with dignity is now compromised.” He urged policymakers to “reverse the plastics crisis” to safeguard human rights.

Under international human rights agreements, most countries have a legal obligation to safeguard their residents’ basic rights to life, health, and an “adequate standard of living.” The question is not whether to defend these rights, but how — which is usually done by zeroing in on more specific enabling rights, like the rights to clean drinking water, nutritious food, and, crucially, a clean and healthy environment, one that is not overly polluted by plastic.

This connection between plastic pollution and human rights was indirectly affirmed last month in a landmark decision by the International Court of Justice, which ruled that, “under international law, the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is essential for the enjoyment of other human rights.” The decision referred specifically to the impacts of climate change, but legal experts say it’s applicable to plastics as well. Plastic litter in the ocean, for example, harms fish populations, thereby affecting fishers’ right to “just and favorable” working conditions. And the chemicals that plastics release into the environment can enter people’s bodies without their knowledge, impacting their right to physical integrity, as well as their right to access information about potential environmental toxicants.

One of Orellana’s specific recommendations was for world leaders to negotiate a “legally binding instrument addressing the whole cycle of plastics” — the plastics treaty that the U.N. is currently working on. Member states have been at work on the treaty since March 2022, and were supposed to have finished by the end of 2024. They’re now aiming to complete it by the end of this week. 

Orellana told Grist there are two broad ways the treaty should incorporate human rights. First, it should explicitly invoke the term — including in its preamble, which lays out the treaty’s orientation and background, in a discrete article on the treaty’s objective, and in more specific articles on finance, chemicals, and other topics. These articles, Orellana contends, could defend particular rights, such as the right to information on the toxic additives added to plastics and the right to benefit from science that is free from conflicts of interest. 

Second, Orellana said, the treaty should implicitly uphold human rights principles, even in sections that don’t use the actual words “human rights.” For example, by endorsing the “polluter pays principle” — which says that the companies and countries most responsible for plastic pollution should be required to pay for its cleanup — the treaty could support people’s right to an effective “remedy” when their other human rights are violated. And a section of the agreement on a “just transition” could ensure job security for people whose livelihoods may be impacted by changes to international plastics and recycling policy, thus supporting the human right to work under favorable conditions. 

Most countries already have an obligation to support these rights, if they’ve signed onto agreements like the U.N.’s International Bill of Human Rights. Mentioning them in the treaty is a way to remind policymakers of what they have to do to uphold those existing commitments. 

Additionally, Orellana said, the treaty must lead to reduced plastic production; orienting it around recycling will not uphold human rights. Recycling is a “mirage,” he told Grist. “It is being pushed by industry interests as a form of distraction and deviating attention from the real issues.” A statement he co-authored last November warned that the negotiations were at risk of shifting responsibility from plastic-producing countries to developing ones without the “capacity or resources to confront the global plastic scourge.”

Last week, during the opening days of the current round of negotiations, several non-governmental observers emphasized Orellana’s call. At one event commemorating the U.N.’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on Saturday, members of the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Plastics said the treaty would fail human rights if it did not specifically defend Indigenous rights. And at a separate event on Tuesday, U.S. racial and environmental justice organizations including Black Women for Wellness, Breathe Free Detroit, and Port Arthur Community Action Network raised connections between plastic production and the right to equality — petrochemical facilities are often more densely concentrated near Black communities — and reproductive freedom, including the right to have a child. Pregnant people face some of the greatest risks from plastics-related chemicals, which can damage their endocrine systems and jeopardize the development of their babies. According to one study published last year, a class of chemicals commonly found in plastic food containers may have caused 10 percent of the U.S.’s preterm births in 2018.

“All birthing people should have the right to have a child, not have a child, full bodily autonomy, and to raise children in a safe and healthy environment,” Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, environmental justice program director for the nonprofit Black Women for Wellness, told Grist. But plastics prevent them from fully enjoying those rights. “So many parts of the life cycle of plastics are direct or indirect violations of the reproductive justice framework,” she added.

And just this Wednesday, a new study from the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN — a global coalition of environmental and health organizations — explicitly described exposure to plastic chemicals as a human rights issue. The organization placed chemical-detecting wristbands on U.N. officials, delegates from Latin America and Europe, and waste workers, and found that everyone was exposed to at least 26 of the 73 plastic chemicals they tested for, with much more chemical exposure for the waste workers. 

“These chemicals invade our bodies, violating our right to a healthy environment,” read a statement from one of the study’s participants, Astrid Puentes Riaño, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. “Industries must be held accountable for the harm caused by their products, and more robust frameworks are needed to stop and remediate this pollution.”

Environmental groups have also urged the bureaucrats in charge of the plastic talks to support procedural human rights during the negotiations — namely, the right to participate in environmental decision-making, which is enshrined in regional treaties like the Aarhus Convention in Europe and the Escazú Agreement in Latin America. Dharmesh Shah, a consulting senior campaigner for the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, said these rights are “fundamental” to an effective and equitable plastics treaty, and to ensure that environmental groups, waste pickers, and Indigenous peoples’ voices are heard.

Since his 2021 report to the U.N., Orellana said he’s been heartened by the increasing number of delegates invoking human rights concepts. But at the same time, the negotiating drafts that those delegates have produced “have yet a long way to go,” in part because there’s been so much opposition from a small but vocal minority of countries that are pushing for the treaty to be “toothless and quite narrow.”

He declined to name the countries but said they have opposed mentioning the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, the right to science, “or human rights generally.” The group of countries typically associated with opposition to reducing plastic production and controlling chemicals is called the “like-minded group” and includes China, Iran, Kuwait, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Some of them have invoked their right to “development” as a way to argue against restricting plastic production, elevating that right above other human rights.

“You cannot separate the right to development from the rights to health and the right to live and the right to shelter,” said Shah, with the Center for International Environmental Law. “The right to development cannot be used as a trump card to continue polluting.”