Global Plastics Treaty

Having dedicated legally binding rules and targets on production and supply of plastics is paramount for an effective instrument. These rules must create the enabling conditions to progressively reduce and eventually phase out overall plastic production. Reducing production is an essential condition to end plastic pollution. It is also necessary to meet climate targets, harmonize with other multilateral environmental agreements, tackle the triple planetary crisis, and create a safe and just future that ensures the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all.

The treaty must eliminate chemicals and groups of chemicals across the lifecycle of plastics that are hazardous to human health, biodiversity and the environment. It must deliver global measures that operationalize the precautionary principle to eliminate groups of chemicals that are hazardous to human health, biodiversity, and the environment, and protect against regrettable substitutes. The central aim of the instrument must be to ensure that hazardous chemicals currently known or later identified by emerging science are eliminated not only from products, but also from materials to protect present and future human health, biodiversity, and the environment.

Voluntary industry commitments, a patchwork of national regulations, and ad hoc product bans currently represent the status-quo. Voluntary frameworks, such as the Paris Agreement, have failed us and the treaty must establish global, harmonized, legally-binding rules and criteria across the full lifecycle of plastics, including microplastics, combined with national targets that implement treaty obligations. To create a level playing field for commercial actors and regulators, these rules and criteria must include obligatory transparency and traceability to set baselines and targets, assess chemical safety pre-market (following the no data no market approach), measure progress, and evaluate effectiveness. This is particularly essential for measures related to the supply of plastics, both as a chemical material and product, in order to fully assess and advance global efforts to reduce plastic production and establish a toxic-free circular economy.

A strong mechanism for means of implementation has the potential to end plastic pollution if combined with ambitious implementation targets. We must avoid voluntary money for voluntary measures that have historically failed us. Ambition needs to be aligned in both control measures and finance. Binding obligations to end plastic pollution should be matched with clear commitments to provide a dedicated multilateral finance that ensures mandatory contributions from developed countries and also provide sustainable, adequate, accessible, and predictable money to support treaty implementation, compliance, and ensure just transition. In addition, financial mechanisms must operationalize the polluter pays principle by internalizing health and environmental costs and fund remediation to protect human health, biodiversity and the environment.

The treaty must ensure a mandatory just transition for workers along the plastics lifecycle, waste pickers and other informal workers and workers in cooperative settings, Indigenous Peoples, and frontline or directly affected communities. This includes financial support, official acknowledgment of their rights, transparency on the health impacts of plastic pollution across the full lifecycle, and full participation in policy-making. Such measures for just transition must be guaranteed to ensure that no one is left behind and that the blight of plastic pollution can come to an end for everyone.

Plastic waste trade of all kinds must be restricted and environmental racism must not be perpetuated. The treaty must obligate environmentally sound management of plastic waste, require prior informed consent from all countries for all plastics, and ban exports from Basel Convention Annex VII countries to non-Annex VII countries. Furthermore, polluting technologies, such as incineration, chemical recycling, and waste-to-energy schemes, must be excluded in the treaty to protect already burdened communities, avoid creating additional harm, and to ensure safeguards for human health, biodiversity, and the environment.

The treaty must prioritize the development and scale-up of safe, toxic-free, and accessible reuse and refill systems. Reuse and refill systems are the cornerstone of circularity that must be secured in the treaty to shift away from a failed recycling-centric model. Establishing global criteria on product design that promote toxic-free circularity is an important measure, but so are legally binding provisions that drive reuse targets, infrastructure investment, and improved system designs that embody a zero-waste hierarchy.

Multilateralism must ensure fair and inclusive decision-making to ultimately achieve the treaty’s goal of ending plastic pollution. Without effective decision-making processes made available, an impasse shaped by those seeking to delay or weaken the treaty could render any progress or achievement meaningless. To avoid earnest negotiations amounting to nothing, negotiators must preserve text that enables countries to decide substantial issues through a majority vote when consensus cannot be reached.

Plastic pollution continues to threaten human rights for present and future generations at every stage of the plastics lifecycle. At a minimum, the preamble of the instrument must reaffirm the importance of human rights instruments and recognize the gravity of human rights implications that occur along all stages of the plastics lifecycle. Moreover, treaty provisions must integrate a human rights based approach and ensure that treaty obligations uphold the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment and the human right to information, participation, and access to justice.

The treaty must be protected from commercial and vested interests, particularly from plastic industries, and fossil fuel and petrochemical sectors. Explicit conflict of interest protections must be in the preamble, included as a criteria when establishing subsidiary bodies and other decision-making bodies, and accompany any treaty text or provisions where the private sector is included. Without strong conflict of interest protections embedded in the treaty, the treaty will fall short of becoming a meaningful and effective instrument that can end plastic pollution.