Nations meet for plastic pollution treaty in Norway

Norway’s climate and environment minister played down calls for strict caps on the production of plastic but said the manufacture of so-called “virgin plastic” should be reduced, as talks on a global treaty to stop the mounting plastic pollution crisis opened on Monday.

More than 145 countries are hoping to hammer out a treaty by 2025, with Norway co-leading the High Ambition Coalition in the talks. Environment minister Espen Barth Eide told DW that market demand for new plastics would decrease as the circular economy increased.

“We agree that we need to reduce production at least of virgin plastics,” Eide said. “Of course, the more circular it becomes, the less (virgin plastic) you need to produce.”

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which is running the talks, released a paper ahead of the negotiations which found plastic pollution could be reduced by 80%. It largely avoided the production issue, focusing instead on a circular economy.

But environmental groups are warning that the talks are too focused on recycling instead of reducing the production of plastic in the first place. Environmental group Greenpeace is calling for production to be slashed by 75% compared to 2017 levels, because recycling most types of plastic, which are made from fossil fuels, remains extremely difficult.

“If we keep the focus at the end of the pipe and on recycling and promoting a bunch of false solutions like chemical recycling, or cement kilns, or waste-to-energy, we will lock ourselves into some of the worst impacts of climate change,” said Graham Forbes, global plastics project leader at Greenpeace USA.

Plastic manufacturers produce about 460 million tonnes of plastic a year — a quarter of which ends up polluting the planet, according to the UNEP. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled. The rest is buried in landfills or incinerated. Plastic waste is set to triple by 2060 and may already have exceeded safe planetary boundaries, found a 2022 study.

The fossil-fuel based product is found almost everywhere on the planet, from the deepest oceans and the highest mountains to the stomachs of sea birds and inside the human body. Norway’s Eide even found plastic and additive chemicals in his own blood test results. While the extent of plastic pollution on land is understudied, it accounts for 80% of marine pollution.