Will politics drive compromise in the United Nations plastics treaty talks? That’s one of the topics that Steve Toloken covered in our April Plastics in Politics livestream. Recording below.
The next round of treaty negotiations start in less than two weeks: INC 4 is scheduled for April 23-29 in Ottawa.
NGOs say they thought the talks would be farther along by this point. But the talks have really been bogged down, and some say they’ve reached a point where they need to make progress in order to reach an agreement by INC 5, which is scheduled to be the final session, in November in South Korea.
“The first three sessions have, I would say — I think everybody would say — they’ve not yielded the kind of progress people would have hoped for, or the kind of consensus or agreements or the space to negotiate compromises so far,” Toloken said.
“So if people want to have an agreement wrapped up by the end of the fifth session, which is an agreement some people are reasonably happy with, there’s still a tremendous, tremendous amount of work to do,” Toloken said.
One reason for the growing sense of urgency is because of elections around the world, including in the United States. People interested in the plastics talks realize that if Donald Trump becomes president, they could end up with an agreement that doesn’t include the United States.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2017, and observers believe that his administration would take a different stance on plastics issues than President Joe Biden.
“There’s a concern that the Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Agreement, [and] they would certainly want to put a different stamp [on a plastics agreement],” Toloken said. “And that would be their right.”
In addition to a preview of the treaty talks and the issues that negotiators will tackle, the livestream also includes the Flexible Packaging Association’s new political action committee, the resolution of a court case over fluorination of high density polyethylene tanks and containers, groups making a business case for container deposits, and a recent Washington, D.C., fly-ins held by plastics groups.
