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‘Disappointed and angry’: how the negotiations for a worldwide plastic treaty fell apart this week
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‘Disappointed and angry’: how the negotiations for a worldwide plastic treaty fell apart this week

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Conversations to skip a milestone worldwide treaty plastic pollution Fell apart on Friday, which made a lot of frustrated and some call it a “missed opportunity”.
Negotiators from 185 countries met in Geneva last week to try to prepare the first legally binding Convention in the World to with the Growing global issue From plastic pollution.
Despite working after Thursday’s deadline and all night, the conversations were ultimately useless and Nations could not reach a consensus.

A large block of countries, including the European Union, Great Britain and many African and Latin -American countries, called to limit plastic production and to increase toxic chemicals in plastics.

However, a smaller group of oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia have argued for waste management instead.
These countries were stuck against the negotiations based on the entire life cycle of plastic: from the dust derived from the oil to waste.

While around 100 countries were looking for caps on plastic production, a number of countries, including the United States, stood against them and claimed that caps were not needed and a threat to their economies and industries.

While a large number of countries argued for caps on plastic production, others, including the US, stood against them. Source: MONKEY / Martial Trezzini/EPA

‘Missed a historical opportunity’

Representatives of countries expressed anger and despair while the conversations were unraveled, but said they wanted future negotiations – despite six rounds of conversations for three years now had not found an agreement.
“We missed a historical opportunity, but we have to continue and act urgently,” said Cuba.
Colombia added: “The negotiations were consistently blocked by a small number of states that simply do not want an agreement.”
Tuvalu, who speaks for 14 Pacific Small Island Developing States, said: “For our islands, this means that without global cooperation and state action, millions of tons of plastic waste will be dumped in our oceans, which will affect our ecosystem, food safety, livelihood, livelihood and culture.”

The French ecological transition minister Agnes-Pannier-Runacher said that she was “disappointed” and “angry” and blamed a handful of countries “led by financial interests in the short term” for blocking an ambitious treaty.

“Oil-producing countries and their allies have chosen to look the other way,” she said.
Graham Forbes, the head of the Greenpeace delegation to the conversations that called the collapse of negotiations a “Wake -up call for the world”.
“The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, but a handful of bad actors was allowed to use process to stimulate such an ambition in the ground. We cannot continue to do the same and expect a different result. The time for hesitation is over,” he said.
Environment NGOs also warned that without the process radically changing the process to better display the majority, future conversations will hit the same dead end.
David Azoulay from the Center for International Environmental Law’s David Azoulay said that the conversations had been a “terrible failure” because some countries were out “any attempt to promote a viable treaty”.

The World Wide Fund for Nature said that the conversations exposed how consensus decision “now” had “had exceeded the role in international environmental negotiations”.

What is happening now?

Oil-producing countries argued that recycling, reuse and product design were sufficient to tackle the problem of global plastic pollution without resorting to production-in-cutting.
However, experts say that these are not substantial answers to the problem.
Ingar Andersen, executive director of the Environmental Program of the United Nations (UNEP), which organized the conversations, has said that the world “will not recycle our way from the crisis of plastic pollution”.
Every year more than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced worldwide, half of which are for one -time use items.

While 15 percent of the plastic waste is collected for recycling, only nine percent are actually recycled.

The future of the UNEP negotiations is now uncertain and although some countries have committed themselves to resuming negotiations, others have stated that they have lost confidence after repeated attempts.
Andersen also promised to continue working. “We didn’t get where we want, but people want a deal,” she said.
On current trends, the annual production of fossil fuels -based plastics will almost triple with 2060 to 1.2 billion tonnes, while, according to the organization for economic cooperation and development, waste will amount to a billion tons.

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