GENEVA – A new draft of the global plastics treaty published Wednesday found a clever solution to answering the difficult questions facing nations seeking the historic treaty: delete them from the text.
The long-awaited draft arrived at a tense moment in negotiations over what many hoped would be a watershed treaty to address the crisis of plastic pollution choking the environment and harming human health.
As delegates shuffled into the United Nations assembly hall, overflow rooms and livestreams, crucial questions surrounding plastic production limits, toxic chemical regulation, human health concerns, finance, and others remained unanswered with just 48 hours left to the deadline.
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BY Stefan Anderson
When the new text landed, that did not change.
The text assembled by negotiation chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso does not define “plastic” or “plastic pollution” – the fundamental crisis the treaty is supposed to address. It does not include the words chemicals, emissions, climate, fossil fuels, or even single-use plastics.
“This text does not have any demonstrable value to end plastic pollution,” Kenya’s delegation said.
The fundamental debate over the scope of the treaty – whether it would address the full life cycle of plastics from the extraction of fossil fuels to manufacturing and disposal – is sidestepped in the active clauses of the treaty. Even Saudi Arabia, in describing the treaty text as a “milestone,” questioned the total omission of scope in the chair’s text.
“We cannot take this text as the basis of negotiations. Our red lines, and the red lines of the majority of countries represented in this room were not only expunged, they were spat on, and they were burned,” Panama delegate Juan Carlos Monterrey told the chair, who sat next to a visibly and uncharacteristically uncomfortable UNEP chief Inger Andersen, to rousing applause from the room.
“Our goal here is to end plastic pollution. Not simply get to a political arrangement,” Monterrey said. “We need to bring production back, we need to bring mandatory reporting back, we need to bring science and justice back to this text.”
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