Plastics treaty talks bring industry leaders to Paris

Find our latest update from the Paris treaty talks here

Paris — The plastics industry is bringing a much bigger presence to the new round of United Nations treaty talks opening May 29 in Paris, where groups plan to push a message that any agreement needs to better recognize the benefits of plastics in society.

In interviews with plastics executives ahead of the negotiations, they also said they saw opportunities for the agreement to boost recycling and help the industry transition to a more circular business model.

In the days ahead of the session, there were some clear points of contention. One prominent consumer products executive, Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever plc, published an op-ed accusing the petrochemical industry of lobbying to undermine the talks.

And some countries and businesses continued their call for the treaty to limit the growth of virgin resin production, a step plastics firms oppose and see as unlikely to win backing from enough countries.

However the talks ultimately come down, the plastics industry presence is much larger this time.

The resin industry has about 60 delegates from different companies and trade associations in Paris, roughly double the first round of talks in Uruguay in November.

Other industry groups are going to the negotiations for the first time, like the Plastics Industry Association, the EPS Industry Alliance and the Association of Plastic Recyclers.

Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics with the American Chemistry Council, said diplomats from the 170 countries attending the five-day session need to consider the benefits of plastics, like supplying materials to enable electric cars or help meet U.N. sustainability goals for clean drinking water, as they start getting into details.

"The U.N. has sustainable development goals and many of those goals from a society benefit perspective, cannot be met without our industry," he said in a May 22 interview. "When we're going in the room in these discussions, whether it's events we're having or participating in, or meetings directed at governments, we do feel there's a core obligation for us to share this narrative."

"It's not getting the attention it needs," he said. "The debate at [the meeting] needs to be focused on solutions to eliminate plastic waste from the environment. We do not believe it should be focused on eliminating the sustainable use of plastics in our economy."

The Paris meeting, taking place May 29-June 2, is the second of five negotiating rounds planned over the next two years. Diplomats hope to use it to springboard to write a first draft of treaty text ahead of a third round of discussions later this year.

A group of global plastics resin associations, including ACC, launched a new website ahead of the talks, plasticscircularity.org, to outline what they hope for.

Similarly, leaders of the Plastics Industry Association are in Paris saying they will push countries to focus on eliminating plastic waste while recognizing the role plastics has in society.

"We support international efforts to promote the elimination of plastic waste from the environment and welcome the opportunity to participate in the global discussions, but any agreement must start with acknowledging the essential nature of plastic," said CEO Matt Seaholm, in a May 23 statement.

Some industry groups made detailed filings to UN officials ahead of the Paris session, highlighting those benefits while also backing measures they say would make plastics more environmentally friendly, like extended producer responsibility, global recycling standards and mandates for recycled content.

A European flexible plastics packaging organization, for example, acknowledged the need for better recycling and end-of-life management of waste, while telling diplomats a film pouch sauce container has 60 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than metal and glass packaging.

In a sense, almost everyone in Paris, from governments to environmental organizations and businesses, say they favor of a treaty.

But there are some key differences over how much flexibility countries should have in meeting treaty obligations, as well as accusations from other business leaders that petrochemical companies want to undermine the talks.

The former Polman, the former Unilever CEO, published an op-ed in Fortune May 24 saying that the treaty needs legally binding rules to reduce plastics use.

"Predictably, some companies are lobbying hard to undermine the talks, led by petrochemicals and fossil fuels," he said. "It's no secret that, as our societies embrace renewable energy more wholeheartedly, many in fossil fuels see the fast-growing plastics sector as a lifeboat."

Unilever and dozens of other consumer brands and retailers are part of The Business Coalition for a Plastics Treaty, which issued a new policy paper in May backing stronger steps in a treaty, including policies to reduce virgin plastic production and the use of virgin plastic.

At a May 26 coalition event in Paris, Unilever Chief Sustainability Officer Rebecca Marmot said a treaty can help create the economic conditions for new business models based on recycled content and reusable packaging.

"One example is on the issue of virgin plastic production and use," she said. "It's clear if this continues unchecked, it will just be impossible for any of us to meet the goals of the treaty.

"For Unilever, we've reduced our virgin plastics footprint by 13 percent since 2019, but the transition remains a challenge because the economics are unbalanced," Marmot said. "This slows down important work around transitioning to reuse and refill models, using more recycled content and creating a business model to collect and process plastic."

Plastics groups, while opposing calls to restrict virgin plastic production, said they support an agreement as a tool to help the plastics industry move to more circular business models.

Baca said one of the resin industry's key messages at the talks is that they support a call in April from the G7 bloc of major industrialized nations to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040.

"Despite what some might say, we also want a well-crafted agreement that can further unlock investment and result in more circular feedstock," he said. "If an agreement is done correctly, we will see a rapid completion of an industry that is moving on a global level from a linear business model to a circular business model."

But U.N. officials, diplomats and others backing a stronger treaty argue that the inability to manage waste from the current rapid growth of plastic production means that stronger steps are needed.

A former Peruvian diplomat who heads the negotiating committee, Gustavo Mez-Cuadra Velasquez, said that globally, half the plastic ever made has been produced just in the last 15 years, and he noted that plastics manufacturing is expected to grow.

At the May 26 event, a United Kingdom minister told the audience a tax on plastic could be one solution.

The U.K. was one of the original members of a group of countries, the High Ambition Coalition, that are calling for stronger steps. That coalition also organized the May 26 event and released a detailed statement of goals ahead of the Paris negotiations.

"We believe that the treaty must restrain and reduce the production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels," said Rebecca Pow, a parliamentary undersecretary of state. "We've actually introduced a tax on plastic packaging that contains less than 30 percent recycled content so that we're providing a very clear economic incentive for businesses to move away from the use of virgin plastic."

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, told the gathering that the treaty should find a way to improve the economics of plastics recycling.

"We need to get out of all that virgin plastic that are pouring into our markets and make that more scarce or more expensive or somehow less desirable than recycled plastic," she said. "That is one of the dimensions that the treaty negotiations need to find a way of dealing with."

Baca said he saw potential for broad agreement in the treaty in areas like recycled content mandates, building waste management capacity for the 3 billion people worldwide who lack access to good sanitation, stronger standards for pellet management in factories and extended producer responsibility.

In spite of the differences between countries and groups, he said he was optimistic about the treaty's direction.

"I do think that science, data and facts, all those things will eventually align with the point of view that we need to keep plastic waste out of the environment and we need to keep plastics sustainably in our economy," he said.

The Plastics Industry Association, for its part, outlined five negotiation priorities for the treaty: recognizing the essential role of plastics, setting "ambitious yet reasonable" goals, data standardization, avoiding production caps and encouraging partnerships.

"The final agreement must offer an end result that all countries can look to as a reasonable, attainable set of guidelines, and not one that causes multi-country divisiveness or quests to externally govern over regulations that are established internally by a particular country," the association said.

A U.S. plastics recycling group said it was attending the talks because it sees the agreement as an important way to bring faster policy change in the United States.

"The U.N. is a big process and I really do see a huge opportunity for this to accelerate change in the U.S.," said Kate Bailey, chief policy officer with the Association of Plastic Recyclers.

Bailey said APR was focused on seeing recyclability design standards and extended producer responsibility in the treaty.

"We're really looking to harmonize globally on how we define what is recyclable and how we're designing," she said. "We're also very excited to see producer responsibility being called out as a fundamental mechanism to increase the supply of recycling for plastics and other materials."

Bailey said APR also wants to communicate to diplomats that while there are challenges — "we know we can do a lot better in the U.S." — recycling is working.

"What I'm most excited about … [is] to be able to speak to the realities of recycling and what we know how to do already," she said. "We just need some of those policies and investment levers to drive changes forward."

Bailey said she wanted to "break through that narrative that recycling isn't working at all."