A treaty to end plastic pollution is still out of reach — that’s not necessarily a bad thing 

The nations of the world have been on the precipice of reaching a global agreement to curb plastic pollution for a few years now. Delegates from 184 governments met in Geneva this month to try to hammer out a final treaty, but in the end, they walked away without a deal.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Delegates have missed their 2024 deadline, which was extended to this round of talks. But no deal is better than a bad deal, environmental advocates say. The big schism was over whether the treaty should phase out the use of hazardous chemicals in manufacturing and set limits to how much plastic is actually produced. Countries where plastics and fossil fuels are big business — including the US and Russia — would rather just focus on managing and recycling waste, leading to the deadlock.

“We need to address unhinged plastic production,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, a delegate from Panama, said during a Thursday press conference before negotiations came to a close. “We’re not here to simply get to a deal. We are here to end plastic pollution.” 

Plastic production has exploded since the 1950s, reaching 475 metric megatons a year by 2022. That’s the year that United Nations member states committed to developing a legally-binding agreement on plastic pollution. 

Plastics are made with fossil fuels and more than 16,000 different chemicals that leach into the environment and wind up in our air and our bodies; that’s why health advocates are calling on policymakers to pump the brakes.

The industry has also been facing increasing heat for peddling recycling as a solution. California filed suit against ExxonMobil last year over what it calls a “campaign of deception” about plastic recycling. It’s estimated that less than 10 percent of plastic waste has ever been recycled. The material is difficult and costly to rehash, and even products made with recycled plastic typically still need to be reinforced with freshly-made plastic. 

Recycling, as a result, can fuel more production, says Mohamed Kamal, a waste management expert and executive director of the Egypt-based foundation Greenish who attended the talks in Geneva. “Recycling is a reaction to the generation of waste. It is not a preventive method,” Kamal tells The Verge. “You would want to prevent yourself from getting injured. You wouldn’t want to get injured and then react every time.”

A “high ambition coalition” of more than 70 nations, led by Norway and Rwanda, wants to go farther by addressing the entire lifecycle of the material, including restraining plastic production. Details on the next round of negotiations haven’t been decided yet, but they could take place later this year or next year. 

“I feel more emotional than I have in the previous negotiations,” says Jo Banner, who co-founded the nonprofit The Descendants Project with her sister and has attended all of the plastics treaty negotiations to advocate for their community in Louisiana. It’s been nicknamed “cancer alley” since it’s considered a “frontline” community to the problem. There are around 200 industrial plants in the area connected to petrochemical and plastics production. Air pollution in Louisiana has been linked to higher cancer rates, particularly in neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black residents and with higher poverty rates. A treaty that doesn’t pay any attention to the health risks caused by plastic production wouldn’t begin to help her community heal, Banner says. 

“We are willing to go without [a treaty] than to have something that will continue to harm us,” she says. “I know it may seem like, in many ways, it is a failure. But ultimately … people from the frontline have been able to be on a global stage intervening for their communities.”