The resumption of negotiations in mid-August in Geneva did not enable countries to adopt an international treaty to put an end to plastic pollution. The second part of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5.2) was due to culminate in an agreement, following the failure in Busan, South Korea, in December 2024 (see EUROPE 13536/14).
The latest draft text, submitted on 15 August by the Chair of the negotiating committee, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, did not satisfy either the nearly 100 signatories of the Nice Declaration of June 2025 for an ambitious treaty (see EUROPE 13657/5) nor the plastic-producing countries, which want a guarantee that the treaty will not cover production issues.
Agnès Pannier-Runacher was “disappointed and angry” at the outcome of this fifth round of negotiations, which was supposed to be the last. In a post on LinkedIn, the French Minister for Ecological Transition recalled that the coalition for an ambitious treaty wanted to “reduce plastic production, ban the most dangerous products and finally protect people’s health”. But for her, the latest text presented by Luis Vayas Valdivieso left “too many points unresolved”.
For its part, the European Commission acknowledged in a post on the social network X on 15 August that the latest text did not “yet meet all the ambitions” of the EU, which had come to Geneva to defend a legally binding ‘plastics treaty’ covering the entire plastics value chain (see EUROPE 13693/15).
The latest draft text does not explicitly propose to limit plastic production, but states that “current levels of plastic production and consumption are unsustainable, exceeding current waste management capacities” (...) and suggests “a coordinated global response to halt and reverse these trends”. However, the conditional and the alternatives remain in the text when it comes to reducing or phasing out the production and consumption of plastic products.
The square brackets, which indicate disagreements in the text, also remain numerous on the question of financing. Countries such as the Gulf States, Iran and India want to leave the burden of financing to the developed countries, which the Western countries have consistently refused to do, asking instead, for example, that the plastic and oil-producing countries be included.
In a joint statement issued on 15 August, the NGOs Surfrider Foundation Europe, Zero Waste France and the Foundation for Environmental Justice condemned a proposal based on “voluntary commitments” rather than genuine constraints. They deplored the lack of control over plastic production and the absence of quantified reduction targets, as well as the absence of “clear restrictions on hazardous products” and “robust traceability measures”. They attributed this latest failure to the oil- and plastics-producing states, which they said “blocked collective ambition, undermining multilateralism”.
The venue and date for the resumption of talks have not yet been determined.
To see the 15 August draft proposal: https://aeur.eu/f/i4t (Original version in French by Florent Servia)