GENEVA – A new draft of the global plastics treaty published Wednesday found a clever solution to answering the difficult questions facing nations seeking the historic treaty: delete them from the text.

The long-awaited draft arrived at a tense moment in negotiations over what many hoped would be a watershed treaty to address the crisis of plastic pollution choking the environment and harming human health.

As delegates shuffled into the United Nations assembly hall, overflow rooms and livestreams, crucial questions surrounding plastic production limits, toxic chemical regulation, human health concerns, finance, and others remained unanswered with just 48 hours left to the deadline.

When the new text landed, that did not change.

The text assembled by negotiation chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso does not define “plastic” or “plastic pollution” – the fundamental crisis the treaty is supposed to address. It does not include the words chemicals, emissions, climate, fossil fuels, or even single-use plastics.

“This text does not have any demonstrable value to end plastic pollution,” Kenya’s delegation said.

The fundamental debate over the scope of the treaty – whether it would address the full life cycle of plastics from the extraction of fossil fuels to manufacturing and disposal – is sidestepped in the active clauses of the treaty. Even Saudi Arabia, in describing the treaty text as a “milestone,” questioned the total omission of scope in the chair’s text.

“We cannot take this text as the basis of negotiations. Our red lines, and the red lines of the majority of countries represented in this room were not only expunged, they were spat on, and they were burned,” Panama delegate Juan Carlos Monterrey told the chair, who sat next to a visibly and uncharacteristically uncomfortable UNEP chief Inger Andersen, to rousing applause from the room.

“Our goal here is to end plastic pollution. Not simply get to a political arrangement,” Monterrey said. “We need to bring production back, we need to bring mandatory reporting back, we need to bring science and justice back to this text.”

The new text further omits any mention of youth, impacts on future generations, gender or inequality. Generation Z, the youngest generation that will have to reckon with the legacy of the plastic pollution crisis, now makes up one-third of the global population.

Every active article addressing the health impacts of plastic pollution and the 16,000 chemicals used in their production has also disappeared from the new text. These chemicals have been linked to cancer, infertility, cardiovascular disease and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually, according to The Lancet.

“We are extremely disappointed at the Chair’s Text’s blatant disregard for the protection of human health and the environment,” said Jam Lorenzo, deputy executive director of BAN Toxics. “A plastics treaty without strong provisions on chemicals of concern can never be successful.”

Two articles considered essential by civil society, health experts and scientists covering transparency and traceability of chemicals used in plastics and regulating the use of the over 4,200 toxic chemicals – and the thousands for which no public health data is available – are gone.

The new treaty draft confirms another central fear of the health community throughout negotiations: mentions of health are framed as “potential health implications” and “risks,” going against mountains of scientific evidence that show the health impacts of plastic pollution as definite, not theoretical.

“The global public is aware of the issues. They know the risks, and they’re demanding this of their government,” Megan Deeney, a Scientists’ Coalition member from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medecine said.  “We can choose to do this now, or we can wait until it’s that much worse and that much harder to come back from.”

The two other mentions of health can be found in the preamble, “noting with concern” the effects of plastic pollution on human health, and “recalling” the UN Declaration of Human Rights’ mention of a “right to a healthy environment.”

“In its current form, the proposed text is not acceptable. It does not meet the minimum that is needed to respond to the challenges before us,” Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunike said on behalf of the EU. “Only through stronger commitments and more concrete provisions can we ensure the transformative impact that this process was intended to deliver for our citizens and the environment.”

Tap stays on

The pivotal battleground issue of limiting plastic production has been deleted from the active clauses of the treaty text. It is mentioned once in the preamble, “reaffirming the importance of promoting sustainable production and consumption of plastics.”

No mentions of reducing or limiting production are present in the text.

The solutions offered by the treaty to manage plastic production are a complete victory for major plastic-producing nations and the petrochemical industry, including only product design, waste management, and circular economy approaches as remedies.

Less than 9% of all plastics ever produced have been effectively recycled, according to OECD estimates. Yet even that figure exceeds the recycling rates of nations pushing waste management as the solution: Saudi Arabia recycles just 3-4% of its plastic waste, Russia between 5-12%, and the United States only 5-6%.

Global plastic production is expected to triple by 2060, with the plastics market surpassing $1 trillion annually within the decade. If the plastics industry were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. At projected growth rates, plastics alone could consume a quarter of the remaining carbon budget needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.

“The new chair’s text makes a mockery of a three-year-long consultative process that showed broad support for an ambitious plastics treaty that addresses the full life cycle of plastics, including production,” said David Azoulay, head of delegation for the Center for International Environmental Law.

“It gives in to petrostate and industry demands with weak, voluntary measures that guarantee we continue to produce plastic at increasing levels indefinitely, fail to safeguard human health, endanger the environment, and damn future generations,” he added.

The legally binding nature of the treaty also appears obsolete in the context of the new draft, which turns to voluntary measures at national discretion rather than well-defined commitments to measures on chemicals, pollution or production.

Without binding production limits or chemical regulations, the question of who pays for plastic pollution becomes even more critical. Yet unlike other environmental treaty talks – where financing debates over trillions in climate adaptation funds have dominated recent negotiations – the plastics treaty offers only vague promises.

The treaty proposes establishing a new financial instrument, though no numbers or funding targets are mentioned. Like plastic pollution itself, the burden falls heaviest on countries that did little to cause the crisis. Recent experience from the Loss and Damage Fund to the Cali Fund for Biodiversity indicates this fund – still unnamed – will not be operational for years.

“This treaty all but ensures nothing will change,” Azoulay said. “It will be very difficult to come back from this.”

Written in the shadows

The negotiations that led to the new text proposed by the chair are shrouded in secrecy. Informal negotiations and closed-door meetings between nations, the chair and UN Environment Programme representatives dominated the process.

Civil society, including many indigenous peoples, waste pickers and frontline communities, travelled to Geneva from around the world, were effectively shut out of the process altogether. A meeting held by Valdivieso to update observers on Tuesday evening lasted ten minutes – he took no questions.

“Why are we here? Why have we paid so much money? Why are the indigenous people here? I honestly don’t know,” said Arpita Bhagat, GAIA’s Plastics Policy Officer, of the exclusion of civil society, adding that the inclusion of civil society has diminished with every INC.

“We are at a point in civil society where we are thinking about our choices,” she added. “We have left our families for two weeks, some people risking their jobs, and for what?”

Nations did not receive the text ahead of the plenary session, which hampered their ability to provide feedback during the short open-floor debate that was allowed. Valdivieso cited his “commitment to incorporating as many … inputs as possible” as the reason for not delivering the text to all countries.

Due to the opaque nature of the negotiations, it is not clear which countries participated in the final drafting of the new treaty text. What is clear is the universal rejection, even from nations seeking a weak treaty: the United States cited seven “red lines crossed,” while Saudi Arabia opposed multiple clauses.

One thing is certain: on Tuesday, Denmark’s environment minister promised “drama” was ahead. With the outrage over the new draft and 48 hours left to the deadline, that drama is well underway.

Image Credits: UNEP.