The UN Environment Program (UNEP) is hosting talks involving 145 countries with a view to producing a treaty by 2025 with the aim of reducing plastic pollution and reducing 80% of plastic waste by 2040. In this context, it has been reported that some countries, including the U.S., Saudi Arabia, China, and India, are pushing for less ambitious targets than others.
In contrast, 55 participating nations have banded together into the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Coalition. Its co-chair, Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, who is also the Minister for the Environment of one member of this group, Rwanda, expressed its objective in terms of “a responsibility to protect human health in our environment from the most harmful polymers and chemicals of concern through the treaty.”
Some countries, even within the High Ambition Coalition, prefer to somewhat de-emphasize overall plastic production in favour of waste management and recycling. Norway’s Minister for Climate and the Environment, Espen Barth, for example, expressed the view that “we need to reduce production at least of virgin plastics. Of course, the more circular it becomes, the less [virgin plastic] you need to produce.”
The primacy of reducing plastic production was highlighted by non-state actors.
Greenpeace argued the talks focus excessively on recycling plastic rather than rolling back its manufacture in the first place. The group’s U.S. “global plastics project” head, Graham Forbes, argued:
If we keep the focus at the end of the pipe and on recycling and promoting a bunch of false solutions like chemical recycling, or cement kilns, or waste-to-energy, we will lock ourselves into some of the worst impacts of climate change.
In the same vein, the science advisor for International Pollutants Elimination Network, Therese Karlsson, commented that “real solutions to the plastics crisis will require global controls on chemicals in plastics and significant reductions in plastic production.”
For its part, and in the face of such criticisms, the UNEP has emphasised its report’s proposals for reducing plastic packaging, which would scale back plastic production significantly.
Addressing the harm posed by the ubiquity of microplastics, for example, is a worthy cause, and this treaty is an opportunity to promote forms of economic development that do not require large-scale pollution and push against the global dominance of large multinational corporations. It should also, however, be borne in mind that environmentalism, or specifically the shift from old industries to new ones, is always prone to be hijacked by sectional interests, as is the case with so-called fourth industrial revolution sectors.
It is not for those who reject the UN’s 2030 agenda, for example, to react in a knee-jerk fashion to such initiatives then, but to organise so as to adapt and use them, while also advancing their own version of a positive economic and energy transition through other channels.
