The final INC5 meeting in Busan ended on Friday without an agreed text or way forward on key issue of production.
Despite the ongoing efforts from campaigners and negotiators between the meetings, and aspirational calls from the ‘Road to Busan’ group of countries, there was and remains significant pushback primarily from oil producing states.
These states, much like the Wizard of Oz, would prefer we did not look behind the curtain; at the production of plastics, at the chemical content or impact of those plastics, but concentrate only on the waste plastics in the environment. Certainly not on the global environmental and social costs of those plastics.
The outcome was on the one hand disappointing, but on the other not entirely surprising; the meetings have been plagued by delaying tactics, with a significant amount of the meeting times being taken up by procedural matters.
The chair had attempted to push the momentum by circulating a zero-draft text in advance for all parties to work from. During the week Europe and the UK backed a Panama led proposal for a ‘sustainable production’ level of plastics within the treaty, rather than a hard cap, but even this was felt to be too ambitious by a group of oil and plastic producing countries led by Saud Arabia.
The Faultline remains along the production of primary plastics – on the one hand countries who see a growing and expanding market, and on the other, countries who see the growing environmental, climate, health and societal impact of plastics.
The negotiations are not over at this stage, with a new round of talks set to take place in summer 2025, but the question remains can a treaty be agreed that addresses plastic pollution in a meaningful and systematic way through consensus? In the air at the same time are the outcomes from COP29 earlier in the week. Lambasted by campaigners for its failure to support vulnerable countries and generally felt to be a result that left ‘nobody happy’1. With many parallels being drawn between the Plastics Treaty and the Paris treaty this is not the outcome we should be looking to emulate either.
So, there is a lot to digest in the coming weeks as we look through the output of this meeting and prepare for the next. But perhaps it was best summed up by Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama's head of delegation “Let us be relentless, we may have been delayed but we will not be stopped.”
