A global tug-of-war over plastic pollution was expected to run late into the evening Monday in Ottawa, as delegates from 174 countries wrangled over wording and next steps to regulate a substance that is making its way into oceans, birds and marine life, and the human bloodstream.
Over the past week, delegates and observers from around the world have gathered at the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, or INC-4. The committee, under the United Nations Environment Program, was set up in 2022 to develop an international legally binding treaty on plastics by the end of 2024. A fifth and final session is scheduled to be held in November in South Korea.
Plastic production has expanded exponentially in recent decades and the world produces 400 million tonnes of plastic a year, according to the UN program, with that volume projected to double by 2040. Plastic waste is piling up in waterways and landfills around the world, with developed countries, including Canada, shipping plastic waste outside their borders for disposal.
The Ottawa session was seen as critical to winnowing down draft treaty text and setting the stage for intersessional talks: Discussions that would allow parties to continue refining and discussing potential treaty measures between now and the final session in South Korea.
Talks to date have featured some progress on issues such as marine waste but delegates have struggled to come up with a streamlined framework, said Melissa Gorrie, law reform manager with Ecojustice, an environmental group.
“The text is still quite bloated – and while there has been various rounds of negotiations and work being done on the text itself, we’re not really seeing the streamlining,” said Ms. Gorrie, who attended the Ottawa talks as an observer.
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Environmental groups have been pushing for the treaty to include a clear commitment to reduce plastic production, saying improved waste management and recycling won’t be enough to deal with the scale and effects of plastic pollution.
“There are lots of details to be figured out as to how that would work, but the first step would be just agreeing that we are going to address plastic production and then the details can come from there,” Ms. Gorrie said.
Some delegates are also pushing for more representation and participation by Indigenous peoples, whose communities are among those most affected by plastic pollution.
In an interview Friday, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said he hoped delegates would be able to agree on 70 per cent of the text of a draft treaty, with the remaining text to be worked out in the final session. He also hoped that the Ottawa session would result in agreement on intersessional talks. There were no such talks between the third and fourth sessions as countries didn’t agree on what they should cover.
The global plastic market was valued at US$712-billion in sales in 2023, according to Statista, which noted that plastic’s properties, including durability and thermal stability, make it ideal for applications such as automotive parts, food packaging and consumer products.
Industry has been pushing back against a production cap, instead promoting recycling and waste management. An April report by Oxford Economics, commissioned by the International Council of Chemical Associations, warned against a cap, saying such a limit would push up the price of virgin plastic, resulting in higher costs and consumer prices.
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Environmental groups say industry is worried about losing profits and is looking to the plastics sector to make up for potential losses if global demand for oil and gas declines.
An April report by the Center for International and Environmental Law said 196 industry lobbyists had registered for the Ottawa plastic session, up 37 per cent from 143 industry representatives registered at the third session held last year in Kenya.
Experts say a successful plastics treaty would result in something akin to the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 agreement in which countries agreed to phase out chemicals that damage the ozone layer, the Earth’s atmospheric shield against ultraviolet radiation. Originally completed in Montreal by 24 countries, the pact has now been signed by 197 countries and is one of the few treaties to achieve universal ratification, according to the United Nations Environment Program. The agreement phased out harmful substances in steps, with different timetables for developed and developing countries.
The Montreal Protocol has helped prevent millions of cases of skin cancer and eye cataracts and helped to phase out 99 per cent of the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances, according to the federal government.
Wendy Stueck