Surely no one really believed that the UN Plastics Summit in Geneva would produce a useful treaty after the five previous meetings had seen no rapprochement at all? Only absolute dreamers and hopeless optimists could have expected that.

After all, the positions are – just as before – diametrically opposed. Some of the delegates want a cap put on plastics production in an attempt to curb global littering through plastic products. Those sitting on vast quantities of oil, gas, and coal, however, would consider themselves off their proverbial rocker if they allowed themselves to be told how many pellets they are allowed to produce from their black and gaseous gold.

On top of this, the negotiating procedure comes with a structural flaw: in a similar way to the European Union, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) of the UN Environment Programme is damned to unanimity. One single country is enough to topple a consensus. And whereas the EU mostly has to deal with only one or two troublemakers, the INC has no shortage of obstreperous members: the US, China, Russia, and all OPEC countries, to mention only a few.

Yet it could all be so easy. Donald Trump showed what the solution to the global plastics waste problem could look like. A coalition of the willing – after all, a good 100 countries worldwide could be grouped together under this flag – could come to an agreement and impose tariffs on plastics imports from the producing countries. Nobody could really object if this money were used for the specific purpose of local environmental protection or setting up a waste management plan – as the industrial countries are vehemently demanding in order to distract from the demands being made on them to cap their capacities.

However, after Geneva, an agreement seems to have shifted into the even more distant future than after the round of negotiations that failed last December. Instead, there are embarrassing statements of feigned disappointment and schoolmasterly reprimands from both directions – mind you, not without finger pointing. At the forefront are those who under no circumstances want to be held back, i.e. the producer associations, among others in Europe and the US. Many observers of the “Drama of Geneva” regard the categorical insistence on their own position as disgraceful and harmful for the matter as whole.

Consequently, the only real beneficiaries of the Geneva get-together with its 2,600 participants were the airlines and naturally the Swiss hotel and restaurant trade – as before in Punta del Este, Paris, Nairobi, Ottawa, and Busan.

Sven Arnold
Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Kunststoff Information

 

— Translated by Jon Relton