The Global Plastics Treaty is a Go – Now What?

At WasteExpo, a popular Sustainability Talks session addressed a topic on many people’s minds: “The Global Plastics Treaty is a Go – Now What?”

The panel discussion featured Dave Ford, Co-Founder, Oceans Plastics Leadership Network; Erica Nunez, Program Officer, Plastics Initiative, The Ocean Foundation; and Ian Rosenberg, Founder & CEO, First Mile and Day Owl.

Ford set the stage by noting that a global plastics treaty is “desperately needed because the plastics crisis is an absolute chaotic and complicated mess.” It is, he asserted, “one of the messiest crises that has hit humanity” and that “plastic does not care about borders.”

He went on to discuss that there is now a mandate to start negotiations; at the fifth UN Environmental Assembly (UNEA) in March of 2022, member states agreed on such. The treaty will be: legally binding, consider the full lifecycle of plastics, promote sustainable production of plastics, acknowledge plastic’s potential risk to human health, and recognize the role of waste pickers and informal workers in solving the plastics crisis.

Nunez then shared some perspectives from her presence at UNEA. She noted that, of course there are many different challenges at the country level, so the treaty can’t realistically cover everything; “It’s really going to be up to countries to decide where they’re going to focus energies.” So, the progress is “great, but the work continues.” At present, the goal is to have the treaty completed in time for UNEA 2026, at which point the focus will shift to national action plans.

Rosenberg noted that the people who will be affected most by the treaty are those at the bottom of the chain—those involved in the informal sector. And, “All of you are probably asking yourselves, ‘Well, how does that affect me? How does that affect what we’re doing in the United States?” The answer, Rosenberg said, is that “these systems are all inherently connected.”

He went on to observe that, “The U.S. is by far the worst [at recycling] among industrial nations and probably the worst among all nations—and it comes to our policies and our execution around recycling. We’re just terrible at it; there are no bones about it. Haiti does it better than us, and they don’t even have a government. The reason for that is because the systems are driven by the market in a way where the numbers sometimes don’t make sense in the U.S.” There is an element of, “burn it down” in our systems now, he noted. Ultimately, “whatever comes out of the treaty ends up being a guidebook for the U.S. for doing things a little differently than we do now.” We are not, he emphasized, “going to Band-Aid our way out of this system.”

Nunez agreed that, “It’s going to be key for every country to look at their individual circumstances and see where their weak points are, and where improvements can be made.” Also, in the case of the U.S., standardization across all fifty states is paramount because, “Fifty different systems are not going to get us where we need to go.”

Rosenberg also pointed out that, at the end of the day, there is money to be made in “ensuring that the waste we produce is dealt with.” And, “it doesn’t matter if you think the Earth is going to warm; what actually matters [to those of you in the room] is that there is money to be made if you do this right—and if we could gather that will here in the U.S. we will solved 80% of the issue; the remaining 20% policy will help us with.”