“We have the opportunity, once in our lifetime, to profoundly change our relationship with plastics. We can’t waste it. » The warning comes from Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) as a new diplomatic sequence crucial for the future opens, Tuesday, April 23, in Ottawa, Canada of the future international treaty supposed to put an end to plastic pollution and the protean threat it represents for ecosystems, human health and the climate. Global plastic production has more than doubled in twenty years to reach 460 million tonnes per year and could triple by 2060 at the current rate.
The schedule is tight. The objective is to arrive at a legally binding text before the end of the year for formal adoption in the first half of 2025. Representatives of 175 countries meet under the aegis of the UN until April 29 for a fourth session of intergovernmental negotiations before a final meeting scheduled for November 25 to 1er December in Busan, South Korea. The previous session, organized at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, in November 2023, certainly produced a first draft of the text, but above all it revealed numerous points of disagreement.
Two blocks confront each other. A coalition chaired by Norway and Rwanda and bringing together 65 members, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, is defending a text “of high ambition”. This group wants to act at the source and places particular emphasis on reducing plastic production. A report published on April 12 by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reassesses upwards the climate impact of primary plastic production which relies on the extraction and transformation of fossil energy. If it does not decrease by 12% to 17% per year from 2024, it will single-handedly derail the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C even if progress is made. accomplished in other sectors (transport, agriculture, energy, etc.) that emit high levels of greenhouse gases, warn the authors. Non-governmental organizations are calling for a 75% reduction in production by 2040.
“Logic of obstruction”
An ambition that is not shared by the oil and plastic producing countries which have set up around the Gulf countries a coalition for the sustainability of plastics which brings together Iran, Russia, Brazil and even India. Supported by the lobbies of the petrochemical industry (143 representatives were accredited during the last round of negotiations in Nairobi), these countries are reluctant to accept any obligation to reduce plastic production and favor an approach based on recycling, which limits today below 10% globally. The United States and China, the two largest consumers of plastic, are not officially part of this coalition but are on the same line.
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