UN environment body pushes ahead on plastics treaty

The United Nation's top environment body wrapped up a pandemic-limited virtual session Feb. 23, with leaders of the gathering of the world's environment ministers vowing to press ahead on talks for a global plastics pollution treaty.

At a news conference closing the United Nations Environment Assembly meeting, UNEA's top official said the 2021 digital-only meeting made it challenging to have detailed talks but he argued there's strong interest in moving forward on plastics when the body holds an in-person assembly in early 2022.

"There has certainly been a strong momentum building [with] a lot of nations joining calls to agree on a binding agreement and a lot of countries are taking steps on their own," said Sveinung Rotevatn, UNEA's president and Norway's minister of environment and climate. "But I think we'll have to wait … before we get into negotiations between member states, and we'll see where that leads."

The details of any potential treaty remain unclear, but advocates see it as a way for countries to commit to national plans around reducing plastics pollution and encouraging more sustainable business models.

Rotevatn said Norway prefers a binding agreement but he acknowledged differences between countries.

"Speaking as the Norwegian environment minister, I could certainly be in favor of [a binding treaty]," he said. "But as you know, at UNEA we take decisions together, and we'll see what the appetite is."

Some of those differences and the details of a potential treaty were on display at a Feb. 17 U.N.-sponsored diplomatic forum on how nations should address plastics.

There, governments from Europe and Africa, along with a high-level U.N. official, urged UNEA to start drafting a formal treaty.

Ines dos Santos Costa, Portugal's secretary of state of environment, told the forum a global treaty would help coordinate different national approaches on plastic and should consider things like carbon pricing, leveling the field between recycled and virgin plastics, product design, recycled content and litter control.

"We need to have a global legal framework that is fit to tackle this problem at an international level," she said. "Of course we need plastics, but I think we have relied on it beyond [what is] reasonable to allow low-cost mass production to favor disposability."

She said plastics production is projected to double by 2040, and the amount of plastic in the ocean will quadruple, indicating that current control efforts are not working. Costa said investments in cleanup and recycling are lagging well behind investments in new plastic production.

A United Nations report released Feb. 18 for the UNEA meeting said that plastic litter in the oceans has grown tenfold since 1980 and accounts for 60-80 percent of marine debris.

The idea of a global treaty has previously garnered some support from businesses. Packaging maker Amcor Ltd., polyolefins maker Borealis AG and recycling equipment supplier Tomra issued a joint statement in October, with Coca-Cola Co. and other large companies, supporting a global treaty.

Borealis said at the time there was an "urgent need" for a more ambitious approach.

But one U.N. official at the Feb. 17 event, Peter Thomson, the U.N. Secretary General's special envoy for the ocean, predicted difficult discussions with the plastics industry.

"I foresee a long, hard engagement with the producers of plastic, the petrochemical industry," Thomson said. "I imagine this battle could make our long, drawn-out struggle with the tobacco industry look like a bun-fight."

The details of any potential global agreement are yet to be settled. Advocates have said they do not envision it funding waste management around the world, but rather guide countries in setting national plastic plans, developing sustainability standards for the material and providing financial assistance around research.

The eight member nations of the Nordic Council made a similar call for a plastics treaty in October and said more than 100 other nations supported it.

A U.S. diplomat told the Feb. 17 event that President Joe Biden's government supports addressing ocean plastic and noted bipartisan support in the Congress in the recent Save Our Seas legislation.

"The Biden administration is moving forward to reinvigorate, on a very broad basis, international environmental engagement from the U.S. government and that definitively does include addressing marine plastics litter and microplastics," said John Thompson, deputy assistant secretary of state for environment.

But he also urged UNEA, which is headquartered in Kenya, to take a flexible approach around a plastics treaty "to allow for countries to apply solutions that suit their own needs, capabilities and circumstances."

Diplomats from other countries made direct statements in favor of a global treaty.

Josephine Gauld, the United Kingdom's permanent representative to the United Nations Environment Programme, said her government supports a marine pollution agreement and compared it to efforts to tackle climate change, overfishing and loss of biodiversity.

"The U.K. believes it's time to start negotiating a new global agreement," Gauld said. "This is needed to coordinate international action on marine plastic litter and microplastics and builds upon and goes further than the important work that we're all doing."

She called for detailed talks before UNEA's planned in-person assembly in early 2022.

Portugal's Costa suggested that various national plastics pacts could be incorporated into a global treaty.

The pacts are voluntary agreements that have seen signatory companies commit to targets to use more recycled content, boost recycling rates and look at different packaging models.

The U.S. Pact, which was announced in August, commits its member companies to 30 percent recycled content in plastic packaging by 2025, up from less than 10 percent now, and to end the use of "problematic" types of plastic packaging.

Costa suggested governments in favor of the treaty would broadly like to see a rethink of packaging use, toward more reuse and focus on product design to reduce environmental impacts.

"We come to a point where there is almost no point in making disposable products out of an almost indestructible material," she said.

At the Feb. 23 news conference, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, Inger Andersen, said that some ministers at the UNEA meeting were advocating that countries handle more of their waste domestically and further limit exports.

As well, Andersen said that another U.N. organization, the Stockholm Convention, has started examining some additives in plastic and whether they are persistent organic pollutants.