Plastic treaty negotiations: the end of the honeymoon

This post was originally written on June 2023, after INC 2

The honeymoon is over. Negotiations around the new global plastics treaty have come down to Earth with a hard bump these past two rounds of negotiations as countries wrangled over rules of procedure and semantics, a proxy for the tough fight ahead to dramatically curtail the production of plastic. While progress between national delegations ground to a near-halt, the private sector came into the spotlight to offer its own solutions to the plastic crisis — and these are even more worrisome than lack of progress.

After decades of letting plastic production and pollution spiral out of control, industry is scrambling to show that it can successfully address the solution with private mechanisms. In particular, it seeks to avoid regulatory measures that would cut production, eliminate toxic polymers and additives, and impose transparency on an industry that is accustomed to hiding in the shadows.

A lynchpin of industry’s proposed solutions is the suite of technologies known as ‘chemical recycling’. These are a suite of technologies that attempt to return plastic to its basic building blocks (monomers) and strip out the multitude of additives and contaminants. Despite decades of development, these technologies are incapable of producing clean recyclate that can be turned back into plastic. At best, they produce a dirty, highly-contaminated oil. While the European Commission has clarified that such plastic-to-fuel processes cannot be called ‘recycling’, no such regulation exists in the rest of the world, and industry loosely uses ‘chemical recycling’, ‘advanced recycling’, and ‘molecular recycling’ to refer to plastic-to-dirty-fuel processes. Few ‘chemical recycling’ facilities exist outside the laboratory, but the petrochemical industry promises a massive buildout to process the enormous quantities of plastic waste they generate.

Locating these disposal facilities in the Global South would help the plastic industry avoid the regulatory scrutiny of European and US governments. This would facilitate both the operation of these polluting, energy-intensive processes and the disposal of their hazardous products, in poorly regulated cement kilns and industrial furnaces. Where ‘chemical recycling’ facilities are not available, plastic waste is often sent directly to cement kilns to be burned, thus evading the stricter monitoring and air pollution requirements imposed on municipal and hazardous waste incinerators. But exporting plastic waste to the Global South could run afoul of the Basel Convention, which restricts such waste dumping, leading industry and the WTO to call for unrestricted ‘trade’ in plastic waste.

Tying together this web of schemes is another money-making opportunity, ‘plastic credits.’ Modeled on carbon offset credits, plastic credits are certificates issued by private companies to projects that claim to remove plastic from the environment. They are sold to companies which then claim to be ‘plastic neutral’ because the plastic they use is balanced out by reduced plastic pollution somewhere across the planet. These plastic credit schemes encourage consumer brands to maintain or increase their use of disposable plastics while washing their hands of responsibility for their pollution. At the negotiations in Paris, Verra, one of the leading plastic credit companies, has explicitly called on negotiators to adopt their plastic credit mechanism as the financial mechanism to serve the plastics treaty.

This may cause a sense of déjà vu in those with long memories. It is an exact replica of the playbook followed at the Kyoto negotiations in 1997. Developing countries were demanding that the wealthy countries both cut their emissions and pay for the damage those emissions had already caused. Instead, they got a carbon market that had been first developed for the private, voluntary market, and then adopted as a regulatory instrument. It was supposed to simultaneously deliver emissions cuts and development finance. It did neither, resulting in 18 years’ delay until the Paris Agreement. What it did deliver was a steady stream of scandals, highlighting the impossibility of effectively regulating offset markets.

This approach, so conciliatory to the private sector, contrasts with that employed by more successful treaties, such as the Montreal Protocol. Under the Montreal Protocol, there are no offset markets or crediting mechanisms and financial resources flow directly to projects that reduce production of the problem rather than try to clean it up after the fact. Rather than replicate the mistakes of the climate treaty, plastic treaty negotiators would be wise to learn its hard lessons: keep finance public; avoid market mechanisms; and focus on preventing the problem rather than trying to clean it up.