What to watch for at the 5th — and final? — round of negotiations for a global plastic treaty

As I write this, the 5^th session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution including in the marine environment (INC-5) has just kicked off in Busan, South Korea. This session is the deadline to produce a finalized treaty that aims to bring the world together to combat the issue of plastic waste. It’s also operating under a much different political environment than when the process started in March 2022. Back then, the world was collaborating closely on a solution to the global coronavirus pandemic, and government action on sustainability was in vogue, with the Glasgow Climate Pact being signed six months before, and the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act coming six months later.

Today, things look rather different: The governments whose delegates ratified the resolutions in March 2022 have largely been swept out of power by a powerful wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. Donald Trump, who famously pulled the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, will return to power in January 2025. How can the treaty move forward under these conditions? Here’s what I’m watching for this week (between bites of pumpkin pie):

• Whether we get a final agreement. This seems unlikely to materialize: While the deadline for an approved treaty was set for this session, actually getting there seems very difficult.  The INC chair’s “non-paper” (the closest thing we have to a rough draft of the agreement) still has major gaps where chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso did not feel confident enough to put any proposed text. These aren’t areas that the committee has not reviewed yet but rather areas of major disagreement, most notably Article 6, which deals with caps on plastic pollution, and Article 3, which deals with products of concern. It’s still possible that the committee could get the agreement over the line by the end of the week, especially if the political environment galvanizes them rather than demoralizes them — but my money is on the negotiations stretching into 2025.
• What role the U.S. will play. For much of the process, the U.S. has walked something of a middle path: It did not commit to the caps on plastic production advocated by the so-called “high ambition coalition,” but it did not join countries like Saudi Arabia, pushing for a very limited version of the treaty. Since INC-4, however, the Biden administration has signaled that it is moving closer to the high-ambition coalition, in particular by indicating its support for production caps. What role the lame-duck Biden administration will play in the negotiations remains to be seen. It’s possible that the U,S, delegation could push to get the treaty done in this session, which would be a significant driving force for an agreement.
• Which corporate lobby will hold sway. The INC process has come under significant fire for the level of corporate lobbying, which is often tied to concerns about “Big Oil.” The reality is a little more nuanced, however — there’s obviously a huge amount of corporate lobbying, but the things the lobbyists are pushing for vary widely. One of the best organized lobbies, the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, primarily represents consumer products companies, whose priority is a consistent set of global laws. This group actually signed the Bridge to Busan declaration, which endorses many of the strongest possible regulations including limits on plastic production. The strength of the chemicals and oil and gas lobbying (which are naturally opposed to the strongest measures like production caps) versus this consumer packaged goods lobby will be one of the defining stories of the negotiations.
• Whether global- or national-level regulations will prevail. While there are many elements that could ultimately be in or out of the agreement, the major process question is whether rules will be set on an international or national level. This question will determine the effectiveness of the treaty overall. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes (national-level systems designed to force the producer of plastic goods and packaging to pay for their disposal) are a good example of this. Almost every country in the convention supports the inclusion of EPR, but some want a single, internationally consistent structure and set of goals, while others simply want a mandate for nations to create their own EPR schemes. International consistency will make it far easier to build and scale waste management technologies, particularly advanced recycling technologies, and will make it far easier for corporations to meet these goals if they don’t have to juggle some 180+ different jurisdictions. Nationally defined EPR systems would still move the ball in the right direction (getting big countries like the U.S. or China to adopt such systems would be a major win) but would no doubt slow progress compared to a more internationally consistent approach.

My last thought is this: Don’t write off the global plastic treaty. It’s easy to draw a comparison to international carbon emissions regulations and say that due to the election of Donald Trump, the treaty is dead. That’s undeniably a risk, but I think that’s a very limited analysis. In 2022, when the treaty was announced, I wrote this:

Things are going to be different than how they are in the CO₂ sector, however. Carbon emissions are a highly distributed problem; they come from a huge range of sources across energy, mobility, food, and a range of other industries. Solving the issue of CO­₂ is a battle of inches and thousands of small changes. In addition, when the UN started making agreements on CO₂ in the 1990s, decarbonization was not a high priority for energy companies. The situation with plastic waste is different.

Regardless of who is in the White House, plastic waste remains a high-profile issue that’s on the mind of consumers and governments around the world — even more conservative parties can see it as a concern, as Trump’s cabinet selection of chemicals industry skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr. shows. In addition, major players in the plastics industry, while opposed to measures like production caps, do feel pressure from their customers to change, and measures like EPR will actually help them do so by make more waste feedstock available.

We’ll have a clearer picture of the answers to these questions by next week — and you can hear all about it in our December 5th webinar “How the UN’s Plastic Waste Treaty Will Transform the Plastics Industry,” where I’ll be joined by my colleague Marcian Lee to break down everything that did or didn’t happen at INC-5. I hope to see you there!