First round of plastic treaty talks ends
 with little decided

The first of a planned five sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee - the  United Nations body tasked with developing the first legally binding global treaty on plastic pollution - drew over 2,500 in-person and virtual delegates from 28 Nov - 2 Dec from 147 countries.
This first round of negotiations, known as INC-1, comes nine months after representatives from 175 countries endorsed a resolution on plastic pollution at the United Nations Environment Assembly, after which the UN Environment Programme was tasked with convening and managing the INC process.
In advance, the INC secretariat had determined that the relevant issues fell into four main areas: eliminating and substituting unnecessary plastic and hazardous additives, designing plastic products to be reused and recycled, ensuring products are reused and recycled, and managing plastic pollution in an environmentally responsible manner.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said at the opening of the session in Punta del Este, Uruguay, that it was ‘important that we find our way towards an ambitious multilateral instrument that ensures plastic products are circulated in practice, not just in theory'.
While there was no disagreement about the importance of developing such an instrument, considerable differences emerged elsewhere, such as whether the future treaty should be based on national action plans or global, mandatory targets.
Several delegates indicated the instrument should take a combined approach with legally binding core obligations, control measures and voluntary elements to address the entire plastics lifecycle. Furthermore, many delegates emphasised the need to ensure strong monitoring and reporting mechanisms as part of the success of the future instrument.
However, as one of the delegates, Dr Alexandra R Harrington, Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law Agreement on Plastic Pollution Task Force,  later noted that clear distinctions emerged regarding the Treaty’s structure, the contents and requirements of proposed National Action Plans, the need to focus on various aspects of the plastics lifecycle as a first priority, and how scientific and technical elements are to be merged into the legal and policy elements of the Treaty.
There were no policy-based decisions regarding the contents of the Treaty at the end of INC-1. In fact, said Peter Hjemdahl, co-founder and Chief Advocacy Officer at rePurpose Global, who also attended the meeting, the first round of negotiations ‘saw plenty of narratives and demands being lobbed in every direction, but not a whole lot of solutions.’
“Out of the 1000+ delegates who attended the meeting, there were hundreds of advocacy groups present, ranging from WWF to the petrochemical industry, but barely a handful of delegates that represented innovative solutions against the plastic waste crisis.”
He added: “A big driver behind this lacklustre representation of innovators is the extremely restrictive delegate badging and approval process that biases well-connected, long-standing organisations over newly created ones, and unless this gets fixed for the next set of meetings, the global plastic treaty can risk becoming a piece of text that sounds good on paper but doesn't empower actual solutions on the ground."
The next session, INC-2, will be held in Paris, France in the week of 22 May 2023, during which, it is expected, the delegates will build on the outcomes of this first meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay.