Petrostates Blow Up UN Plastics Conference

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In March 2022, 175 nations agreed to make the first legally binding treaty on plastic pollution by the end of 2024. Think of it as the Paris Climate Accords of 2015, but for plastics. The proposed treaty would address the full life cycle of plastic, including production, design, and disposal. About 100 countries want to limit production, tackle cleanup and recycling, and reduce toxic chemicals that are released from plastic usage.

Sadly, those countries are not the ones who produce plastics. They are just the ones who are inundated by the onslaught of plastic waste. The treaty didn’t get done by the end of 2024, but this month the nations of the world gathered in Geneva to hammer out a deal under the auspices of the United  Nations. After a week, however, a number of countries including Colombia, the EU, and the UK, rejected as “unacceptable” and “unambitious” a draft treaty text that did not include production caps, or address certain highly toxic chemicals used to make plastic products.

The game will sound familiar to those who have followed the torturous COP climate conferences that began in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. The oil producing nations all furiously oppose limiting production in any way. “We can clean up the damage later using carbon capture!” they proclaim. “Petroleum is the life blood of commerce. If you take that away, civilization as we know it will collapse!”

The same finely tuned horse-puckey is brought to bear on plastics, with flotillas of Gucci shod shills lobbyists flooding the plastics conventions with a million and one reasons why limiting plastic production will be an offense against God and a threat to human civilization. Let’s not restrict production in any way. Instead, let’s focus on recycling. Of course, the countries most affected by the torrent of waste plastic are exactly the countries least able to recycle it effectively. 39 of them are island nations that have adopted the designation of Sids — small island developing states — and they are none to happy with the results of this year’s conference.

“It is unjust for Sids to face the brunt of yet another global environmental crisis we contribute minimally to,” Luis Vayas Valdivieso, a representative of those island nations told The Guardian. Representatives of Norway, Australia, Tuvalu and other countries said they were deeply disappointed to be leaving Geneva without a treaty.

Dennis Clare, a negotiator for Micronesia, added, “Some parties, including ours, are not even willing to engage on that text, it’s a step backward. It certainly seems like it was very biased toward the like-minded countries [Saudi, Russia, Iran etc]. There’s problems across the board. There’s no binding measures on anything. There’s no obligation to contribute resources to the financial mechanism. There’s no measures on production or chemicals. This text is just inadequate.”

Plastics In Geneva

In an email to CleanTechnica, Ann Rocha of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), said, “No treaty is better than a bad treaty. We stand with the ambitious majority who refused to back down and accept a treaty that disrespects the countries that are truly committed to this process and betrays our communities and our planet. Once again, negotiations collapsed, derailed by a chaotic and biased process that left even the most engaged countries struggling to be heard. A broken, non-transparent process will never deliver a just outcome.”

The statement by GAIA said that “despite the vast majority of countries being in agreement on the need to cut plastic production, phase out harmful chemicals, ensure a just transition, especially for waste pickers, establish a new dedicated fund, and make decisions through a 2/3 majority voting when consensus cannot be reached, among other ambitious measures, a small group of petro-states calling themselves the ‘like-minded countries’ sabotaged each round of talks by insisting on consensus to block ambition, and threatening to trap negotiations in procedural debate if Member States ever called for a vote.”

The group accused the chair of the conference of failing to establish a platform for equitable and effective negotiations. It claimed the conference was overwhelmed by a huge numbers of fossil fuel and petrochemical lobbyists who frequently obliterated other voices. “The Chair played favorites with the low-ambition minority, while frequently ignoring high ambition countries from the Global South. When powerful countries wielded their money, political muscle, and influence to bully these nations into retreat, the silence from the podium was deafening. This is not the spirit of multi-lateralism —it was coercion.”

Eskedar Awgichew Ergete of Eco-Justice Ethiopia said, “We cannot confuse procedural agreement with meaningful ambition. For years, the Global South has been the driving force behind the most ambitious proposals, but the consensus paralysis has prevented us from delivering the treaty the world urgently needs.”

Salisa Traipipitsiriwat of Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) Thailand pointed out that, “The content is already difficult to agree on, but the broken process makes it worse. Two and a half years in, the rules of procedure are still not agreed upon, and the voting mechanism is still in brackets. Another round of negotiation is welcome, but it won’t help if we don’t fix the process.”

GAIA complained that the conference left ambitious countries lost in process. There were surprise changes in the schedule, a blatant lack of transparency, meeting times moved to 2 am, while the final plenary session started with just 40 minutes notice at 5.30 am — less than four hours after the Chair’s final draft was released.

Petrostates & Plastics

Thais Carvajal of the Alianza Basura Cero Ecuador, was undaunted by the chaos and blatant favoritism for the petrostates. “There was no conclusion for the treaty, but we are not backing down. The process and its challenges have made us stronger. We have changed the narrative and will keep fighting plastic pollution.” Tim Grabiel, an attorney for the Environmental Investigation Agency in London, reacted to the way the conference was run  by saying, “The petrostates used every dirty tactic in the multilateral playbook to delay and deceive, dither and destroy an effective plastics treaty.” It goes without saying that the United States is a big part of that group.

Greenpeace was certainly unhappy with the lack of progress in Geneva this past week. It described the text offered by the chair as a “gift to the petrochemical industry and a betrayal of humanity. By failing to address production or harmful chemicals in any way, this text glorifies the industry lie that we can recycle our way out of this crisis, ignoring the root cause — the relentless expansion of plastic production.”

The final takeaway here is one that will be familiar to readers. The world will continue to burden the environment with plastic crud until the last molecule of oil and methane has been extracted and either burned or turned into more plastics. Better living through chemistry? We think not. Conferences like the one in Geneva are quite Shakespearean in nature, being little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”