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Financial Times: Oil pro­du­cers accused of stalling pro­gress on plastics pol­lu­tion

November 21, 2023

Oil-pro­du­cing coun­tries have stalled efforts to draft the first leg­ally bind­ing inter­na­tional agree­ment on cut­ting plastic pol­lu­tion, accord­ing to offi­cial observ­ers at UN talks in Nairobi.

The global gath­er­ing in the Kenyan cap­ital was aimed at mak­ing pro­gress on a deal for plastic equi­val­ent to the 2015 Paris cli­mate agree­ment.

Clean-up: plastic waste is cleared at a lagoon in Abid­jan, Ivory Coast

But the talks ended on Sunday without a plan to begin work on a draft treaty after some coun­tries pro­posed shift­ing the focus to waste man­age­ment rather than scal­ing down pro­duc­tion.

Block­ing tac­tics by coun­tries that argued against fram­ing a draft were “dis­astrous” and would pre­vent mean­ing­ful work being car­ried out before talks resumed, said Gra­ham For­bes, head of the Green­peace del­eg­a­tion.

“More than halfway through the treaty nego­ti­ations, we are char­ging towards cata­strophe,” For­bes said. “You can­not solve the pol­lu­tion crisis unless you con­strain, reduce and restrict plastic pro­duc­tion.”

Saudi Ara­bia, Rus­sia and Iran were among coun­tries arguing that bind­ing cuts to plastics pro­duc­tion should not be within the scope of the nego­ti­ations, accord­ing to people present at the talks and doc­u­ments released by the coun­try del­eg­ates. Instead, they pro­posed a vol­un­tary, “bot­tom-up” approach focused on improve­ments to plastic recyc­ling.

Rus­sia argued that pro­duc­tion of primary poly­mers, the fossil fuel-based chem­ic­als from which plastics are made, “must not be dis­cussed within the [UN plastics] pro­cess and shall not be part of the future instru­ment”.

Iran said any treaty should “exclude the stages of extrac­tion and pro­cessing of primary raw mater­i­als . . . since no plastic pol­lu­tion is gen­er­ated [then]”.

Last year’s UN envir­on­ment assembly res­ol­u­tion on tack­ling plastics pol­lu­tion, which ini­ti­ated the talks, said the “full life cycle” of plastics, includ­ing upstream pro­duc­tion, should be addressed in a leg­ally bind­ing instru­ment by the end of 2024.

This could even­tu­ally cre­ate an agree­ment akin to the Paris cli­mate deal — under which coun­tries agreed to try and limit the rise in global tem­per­at­ures to below 1.5C — but focused on address­ing the risks to the cli­mate, biod­iversity and human health posed by the 400mn met­ric tonnes of plastic waste the UN envir­on­ment pro­gramme estim­ates is pro­duced glob­ally every year. Less than a tenth of this is recycled.

Before the latest round, a so-called high-ambi­tion coali­tion includ­ing Canada, the EU, Nor­way and the United Arab Emir­ates had called for any draft to address bind­ing cuts to pro­duc­tion.

Any curb on pro­duc­tion would be a blow to fossil fuel com­pan­ies. The mar­ket for the mater­ial is expec­ted to drive a grow­ing share of oil and gas rev­en­ues in com­ing years, off­set­ting weak­en­ing demand as the world trans­itions towards renew­able energy, the Inter­na­tional Energy Agency has said.

Accord­ing to an IEA ana­lysis, pet­ro­chem­ical products such as plastics and fer­til­isers are pro­jec­ted to make up more than a third of the growth in oil demand to 2030 and nearly half to 2050.

Industry was out in force in Nairobi, push­ing for options that did not require pro­duc­tion cuts. The non-profit Centre for Inter­na­tional Envir­on­mental Law advocacy said 143 fossil fuel and chem­ic­als lob­by­ists registered for the event.

The industry said sup­port was needed for “cir­cu­lar­ity”, in which products are reused, recycled or main­tained, and it was invest­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in infra­struc­ture and pack­aging design.

Ana Rocha, global plastics policy dir­ector of the Global Alli­ance for Incin­er­ator Altern­at­ives, said: “The bul­lies of the nego­ti­ations pushed their way through. Plastic is burn­ing our planet, des­troy­ing com­munit­ies and pois­on­ing our bod­ies. This treaty can’t wait.”