Negotiations over a global plastic pollution treaty collapsed on Friday as countries failed to bridge wide gaps on whether the world should limit plastic manufacturing and restrict the use of harmful plastic chemicals.
Environmental groups accused a small number of petroleum-producing nations, which make the building blocks of plastic, of derailing an ambitious effort to tackle plastic waste. “We are leaving frustrated,” Edwin Josué Castellanos López, chief negotiator for Guatemala, told the delegates. “We have not come up with a treaty that the planet so urgently needs.”
It was unclear what next steps might follow the latest round of negotiations in Geneva, which were supposed to the last. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which is hosting the talks, said countries needed time to regroup after failing to reach consensus over draft treaty texts.
“This work will not stop, because plastic pollution will not stop,” she said. “People want a deal.”
Work toward a global treaty began in 2022 after nations agreed to begin writing a broad and legally binding agreement that would restrict the rapid growth of plastic pollution.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that, without global action to curb plastic pollution, plastic production will grow by 70 percent between 2020 and 2040, totaling 736 million tons a year by the end of that period. Overall as of 2020, less than 10 percent of global plastic waste was estimated to have been recycled, with the rest disposed of in landfills, incinerated, or released into the environment.
A coalition of nations had aimed not only to improve recycling and clean up the world’s plastic waste, but curb plastics production. That would put measures like a ban on single-use plastics, a major driver of waste, on the table, some said at the tim. A group of nations also pushed for the treaty to include controls on toxic chemicals in plastic products.
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