(Bloomberg) — About 200 nations couldn’t agree on a treaty to curb plastic pollution after two years of divisive negotiations, but said they made some progress and would reconvene the talks next year.
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A weeklong United Nations-backed summit in Busan, South Korea, concluded early Monday without a legally binding deal to address plastic pollution across the material’s lifecycle, including supply — which doubled between 2000 and 2019 — use, and disposal. However, there was growing support among the majority of countries on the most sensitive issues including production and consumption limits and phasing out harmful chemicals.
Progress was blocked by a small group of mostly oil-producing nations including Saudi Arabia and Russia that opposed new restrictions, arguing that curbs on output and chemicals fell outside of the group’s mandate.
“We are not here to settle for a treaty that lacks an ambition to make a tangible impact,” Juliet Kabera, director general for the Rwanda Environment Authority and a key negotiator in Busan, said during a briefing on Sunday. “The overwhelming majority of countries recognize the severity of the plastic pollution crisis and agree on the need for urgent action.”
The outcome is the latest round in the struggle to gain consensus on global action to tackle climate change. A compromise deal at the annual COP29 climate summit last month was criticized by some as having made insufficient progress in boosting funding available to developing economies, while a UN biodiversity conference early in November ended without agreeing on the creation of a new global nature fund.
The talks, which began in 2022, were aimed at addressing growth in plastic waste, with production forecast to jump about 60% to 736 million tons a year by 2040, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Recent research has shown how toxic the materials are as they accumulate in marine and terrestrial ecosystems and in human bodies.
A majority of countries favored a legally binding treaty and pushed to regulate dangerous chemicals, limit production and consumption, and to phase out the use of single-use products like cutlery.
Major companies had also urged negotiators to deliver an ambitious pact. About 275 businesses that use plastics, including L’Oreal SA, Starbucks Corp. and 3M Co., offered support for efforts to ultimately end the use of some products and chemicals.