The revised draft global plastics treaty will be discussed at the 4^th meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which will be held in Ottawa from 23 to 29 April 2024. A key area of discussion will be where in the plastics life cycle the treaty should focus interventions to reduce plastic pollution.

There are two broad approaches. To prevent the creation of plastic waste in the first place by reducing new plastics entering the economy, including through reducing plastic production, avoiding the use of plastics where suitable and safe alternatives exist, or adopting reuse schemes in which products or packaging are used time after time, thereby reducing the need for single-use alternatives. Alternatively, there are approaches to reducing plastic pollution that manage waste once it exists, including through better waste collection, sorting, and less polluting end-of-life disposal. These approaches seek to reduce the volume of mismanaged plastic waste that becomes pollution.

Yet these approaches are not equally effective. There is clear evidence that only a reduction in primary plastic production will deliver a substantive cut in plastic pollution. This is a point asserted in an editorial in Cambridge Prisms: Plastics published on 22nd April 2024. The editorial urges negotiators to set a legally binding global reduction target for primary plastic polymers. This, the editorial argues, is the single most cost-effective and inexpensive pathway to reduce plastic pollution as no amount of recycling or other better end-of-life waste management can keep up with the sheer volume of plastic waste being created.

While the evidence favouring a primary plastic production cut is clear, it challenges the politics of the global plastics economy. Countries whose economies rely on fossil fuel and petrochemical production reject the idea of plastic production cuts and are lobbying hard to maintain production levels and to avoid the inclusion of a binding reduction target in the final text of the treaty. Evidence from the preceding three treaty negotiation meetings is that the countries whose interests are most affected by possible production cuts are employing blocking and delaying tactics to disrupt the negotiations.

Achieving a production cut will be a major political achievement. It will also prove a critical test case for negotiators’ frequently made assertion that the treaty should be informed by the best available evidence.

Professor Steve Fletcher

University of Portsmouth, UK

Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge Prisms: Plastics