Upcoming negotiations at the fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4) meeting in Canada on a ‘global plastics treaty’ must set targets to reduce plastics production, a policy officer at Ocean Conservancy told Carbon Pulse, though the private sector favours recycling.

Senior Manager of Multilateral Affairs Felipe Victoria emphasised that a ‘full lifecycle approach’ will be critical to reduce plastic waste and should be front and centre at INC-4, which will take place over Apr. 23-39 in Ottawa.

The talks are the fourth of five scheduled rounds to negotiate a global plastics treaty to address the global pollution problem that is having devastating effect on nature, in particular marine biodiversity, as well as on human health.

The approach outlined by Victoria would include both upstream ‘source reductions’ – production cuts, particularly to single-use plastics – and downstream remedial measures like recycling.

However, not all stakeholders are on board, with private sector actors in the plastics industry, oil, and petrochemicals, as well as negotiating parties that export these goods, arguing that the as-yet undrafted treaty text should focus on waste management.

“There is little logic to focusing or over-focusing on the downstream aspects of [the plastics lifecycle], just focusing on remediation,” Victoria told Carbon Pulse.

“That is like trying to prevent water leakage from an overflowing bathtub by mopping the floor instead of closing the tap. Unless you address what is making the continuous flow, you can never holistically tackle the issue at hand,” he said.

Upstream and downstream measures are therefore complementary, Victoria stated, noting that production cuts cannot fully supplant efforts to recycle downstream.

Nonetheless, added Dr. Alexis Jackson, associate director of the California Oceans Program at The Nature Conservancy, speaking on a plastics treaty panel with Victoria Wednesday, “We cannot recycle and clean our way out of the problem.”

Oil exporters, and also environmental market standards like Verra, tend to focus instead on waste collection or recycling.

INDUSTRY OPPOSITION

On the same panel, Victoria’s colleague at Ocean Conservancy, Associate Director of US Plastics Policy Dr. Anja Brandon, stated that the fossil fuel industry has a financial stake in opposing comprehensive plastics reform.

“We should call a spade a spade: we’re up against the fossil fuel industry,” Brandon told an audience of journalists.

“Plastics are made out of fossil fuels, and they are currently being used as the fossil fuels ‘plan B’ as [societies] continue to electrify and transition away from fossil fuels for the transportation sector and the energy sector.”

“We are seeing increased investments and build-out in plastics from the petrochemical industry, which makes virgin plastic dangerously cheap. So, there are plenty of folks with vested financial interest,” she stated.

Chemical recycling of plastics, which has been supported by the EU Innovation Fund, is favoured by the private sector and is highly contentious, even at this high-level stage of negotiations, Victoria added.

“It’s an option preferred by some of the member states … potentially a minority of the member states. Many of the private sector organisations or individuals that have been engaging in this process also favour it and think that it is part of the solution.”

However, this viewpoint does not hold for many non-industry stakeholders in the process, Victoria continued.

“There is a broad consensus among most of the observer organisations – civil society, academia, and science – and the Ocean Conservancy is part of this – that we don’t think [chemical recycling] is the best way to tackle the problem.”

Some are even calling to exclude chemical recycling from the agreement. For example, definitions of ‘recycling’ could be structured in such a way that chemical recycling does not qualify.

“Just as some people want to put this type of language, or these technologies into the agreement … there are also member states and organisations that would like to see chemical recycling left out of the conversation,” Victoria said.

POLLUTERS COULD PAY

Plastics producers could also be required to contribute to a centralised ecological plastics fund in a departure from the traditional international environmental negotiations model of state-origin contributions, Victoria told Carbon Pulse.

Plastics negotiators – some of whom were also country delegates negotiating the Paris Agreement in 2015 – are learning from prior accords, he added, highlighting the importance of funding arrangements.

“There is some indication that member states are analysing, or at least willing to consider [finance] from a different perspective than they did in other multilateral agreements … There is at least a sense that this agreement could consider other viable options, [like] mobilising the private sector [through] complementary financing, without it having to come exclusively from member states.”

“There is an understanding that without private sector money or philanthropic money, outside government contributions, this problem cannot be fully tackled,” he concluded.

The ‘polluter pays’ principle is prominent in international climate policy discussions as a way to describe moral and financial responsibility for addressing climate change.

Nonetheless, Victoria stated that negotiations remain high level and indefinite, potentially prompting INC-4 negotiators to mandate an intersessional meeting before the last plastics treaty negotiations, INC-5, at the end of this year.

For example, dialogue about the possibility of market-led downstream solutions like plastics credits, promoted by Verra, has been scant.

“We just have snippets or small understandings of where some of the countries, or some of the positions, might stand.”

By Alejandra Padin-Dujon – alejandra@carbon-pulse.com

** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter **