Report says plastics treaty should ban ‘problematic' products

A new report from Nordic countries says the plastics treaty needs specific rules to phase down or redesign problematic or unnecessary plastic products, including hard-to-recycle or litter-prone single-use packaging as well as nonpackaging applications like plastic artificial turf.

The Feb. 1 report from the Nordic Council can basically be seen as a suggested path forward — from nations who favor a stricter treaty — on how the global accord could make decisions about how and when to phase out some plastic products.

Many countries and stakeholders want the treaty to include some provisions to reduce what are called problematic, unnecessary or avoidable plastic products, but that's been a point of concern for some in the plastics industry at the talks, including the vinyl and expanded polystyrene sectors.

A representative from one European plastics group spoke at the Feb. 1 online launch of the Nordic report, saying they want the treaty to take a life cycle approach to identifying problematic plastics, and use specific criteria to make sure that alternatives don't become "regrettable substitutions."

"What we particularly don't want are arbitrary lists or negative lists of let's take these products, let's ban them globally," said David Carroll, external affairs manager for the trade group Plastics Europe. "We think we need to take a hierarchical series of questions based on the waste hierarchy."

Carroll said Plastics Europe would like the treaty to include global criteria for identifying problematic plastics, but said his group differs with the Nordic report in that the industry wants more national-level decision making.

"What we are asking for as Plastics Europe is a global methodology to identify the problematic plastic applications, we want global mandatory harmonized criteria," Carroll said. "We think this needs to be right alongside other mandatory global circulatory provisions, such as ecodesign and design for recycling criteria that we want to see in the agreement."

"But what we're calling for, in a slight deviation to the report, is an assessment to take place at national levels and implements the measures in the national action plans," he said. "We think there are applications which may be fundamental in one country and an unnecessary luxury item in another."

He suggested the Plastics Europe approach could help the industry focus on cutting back items likely to leak into the environment while making other plastic products more circular.

"We think we need to focus our items on the items with the highest likelihood of leakage," Carroll said. "This allows us to get with those valuable applications that we all know exist for plastics, in terms of achieving circularity of those, but it also gives us an indication of which circumstances we need to phase out or we need to take specific actions to address the problematic plastics."

At the launch, a diplomat from Norway, which is leading a coalition of high-ambition countries in the talks, said the treaty should include provisions around problematic plastics.

"We think it's important that the plastics treaty does have a mechanism that regulates specific plastic products that have a particular high risk of ending up in the environment," said Erlend Draget, lead plastics treaty negotiator at the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and the Environment. "And frankly, I think people will have a hard time understanding what this treaty is about if we're not able to come together and ban certain items."

Similarly, Walter Shuldt, a diplomat representing Ecuador at the United Nations mission in Geneva, noted that the Nordic report pointed to more than 140 countries that had banned some plastics products and 33 that had restricted one or more polymers.

The treaty draft includes a range of options countries could adopt around problematics, making the Nordic report very useful as the talks move ahead to the fourth round of the intergovernmental negotiating committee talks in April, Shuldt said.

Ecuador's government currently heads the committee, the INC, that administers the talks.

"Without prejudging the results of INC 4, it is clear that one of the main challenges is the identification of relevant criteria or parameters to determine whether certain plastics are problematic, unnecessary or avoidable," Shuldt said.

A representative from Rwanda's government pointed to bans on single-use plastic bags and other products there, and said those measures had both cleaned up urban environments and reduced plastic pollution on farmlands.

As well, an official specializing in life cycle assessments in the UN Environment Programme said revenue from plastic production globally is about $600 billion to $700 billion a year, but the externalized costs of plastic pollution are estimated to be between $300 billion and $600 billion a year.

"There are structural design flaws," said Llorenç Milà i Canals, who heads UNEP's Life Cycle Initiative. "We see that 95 percent of the value of plastic packaging is lost to the economy after one single use."

He said reducing or eliminating problematic plastics should be part of a range of solutions, but he also cautioned that decisions to phase-out certain plastic applications should not lead to replacements with worse environmental impacts.

"The devil is always in the details, and particularly the details of how you're defining the problematic, unnecessary and avoidable," he said. "This is all about avoiding regrettable substitutes, so that when we're pushing out a product that is definitely problematic, we're not replacing this product with something else that is also problematic."