GENEVA – The European Union said Tuesday it is ready to make a deal on a global plastics treaty but will not accept an agreement “at any cost,” leaving the door open to rejecting a weak outcome as negotiators enter the final 72 hours of talks with core provisions still deadlocked.

“The EU is here to deal, but not at any cost,” Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told journalists when asked about reports the bloc was prepared to walk away if production limits were excluded from the final agreement. “If there is no agreement that is good enough, these are negotiations. That’s always an opportunity for everyone in negotiations.”

The commissioner’s carefully worded intervention came as high-level delegations arrived at the United Nations hoping to break a week-long impasse over production caps, health provisions, toxic chemical restrictions, financing, and definitions of key terms, including “plastic pollution” itself.

Countries also remain divided on the treaty’s fundamental scope: whether the agreement should address the full lifecycle of plastics — from feedstock extraction to disposal — or focus only on waste management and recycling.

The EU and an alliance of over 100 states are pushing for hard caps on plastic production, but face stiff opposition from plastic-producing nations. The “like-minded nations” group led by Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and their allies—flanked by the United States and India—have shown no signs of softening their total opposition to production limits in the treaty.

“Everyone will need to compromise,” Roswall said, calling on all 184 nations present to speed up progress towards a deal. “We have a global responsibility to fix this. No country can do this on its own.”

Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke, speaking alongside Roswall, characterised the negotiations as “very difficult,” warning that tensions and “drama” would escalate in the coming days as Thursday’s deadline looms over the talks.

“There’s going to be a whole lot more drama in the days to come,” Heunicke said. “If you are looking for drama, I’d say stay here, because more drama is going to happen. But our goal is that this drama should end up in a deal.”

Both officials declined to specify the EU’s red lines, citing the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations. However, Heunicke emphasised production as a key concern, calling plastic pollution “one of the greatest environmental challenges” globally.

“We know it harms our health, it harms our oceans, it harms our future,” Heunicke said. “At the same time, we also know that plastic production is increasing at an exponential rate. That’s why the EU is here … to secure a legally binding international agreement on how plastic is produced, consumed and disposed of.”

The consensus-based format of the negotiations, which requires unanimous agreement for the treaty to be accepted, has been roundly criticised by nations and observer delegations for allowing nations seeking to weaken or remove articles on health, toxic chemicals and production limits to maintain their positions with little incentive to compromise.

Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama’s negotiator, told a panel on Monday that the like-minded nations had “not moved an inch” since talks began last week.

Ninety-nine per cent of plastics are made from oil, gas and coal, generating a market projected to reach $1 trillion annually in the next decade. Major petrochemical states see booming plastic production as a hedge against declining demand for fossil fuels in traditional energy markets.

Behind closed doors

Progress in the negotiations has been difficult to gauge for civil society observers and media alike. Crucial debates over the treaty’s scope, definitions of key terms like “plastics” and “plastic pollution,” limits on toxic chemicals used in plastics and production caps have all occurred behind closed doors.

Neither INC representatives nor the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the negotiations, have held a press conference since Saturday. That briefing offered few details, with INC chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso deflecting questions about specific treaty articles and which issues were proving the most difficult to bridge between nations.

Negotiators are working from a text with nearly 1,500 items of disagreement on which no progress has been made since Saturday, leaving nations 13 pages further from agreement than after the last round of talks in Busan, South Korea, in December.

Melissa Blue Sky, a senior attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law, noted that the brackets don’t indicate the weight of support: while some clauses have backing from 100 countries, others may have only one supporter, yet all appear equal.

“The draft text is misleading because it presents all options as having the same weight, when in fact, some text additions have the support of over a hundred countries and some with only one,” Blue Sky said. “The INC cannot continue with the status quo and expect the negotiations to result in a final treaty.”

As nations race to find a compromise, experts from the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty — after a brief venue shuffle due to meeting room overbooking — held a press conference stressing the health and environmental consequences if negotiations fall short.

“The science is really undeniable that we need plastic production reduction and we need [it] on global levels and at national levels to be really, really ambitious if we’re going to see any benefits,” said Natalia Grilli, an environmental scientist from the University of Tasmania. “For us, the science is clear. We’re not negotiators … so it’s not that we have red lines. We’re responding to the science.”

It remains unclear when the next treaty text will be released. The clearest picture of progress from recent negotiating flurries will likely emerge at Wednesday’s expected plenary session, though none has been formally scheduled.

Sources close to national delegations told Health Policy Watch they expect negotiations to extend deep into Thursday night and likely into Friday morning, an all-too-typical endgame for UN environmental negotiations.

“If it was only up to the EU, then we all know how high ambitions would be,” Heunicke said. “It is not, however, up to the EU.”

“If we all stick to our red lines, that deal is impossible,” the Danish environment chief added. “We will be worse off if we don’t succeed in making a deal. That’s not me saying a deal at any price, but a deal that is legally binding and has strong text and lays the ground for our work in the years ahead.”