— By Plasteurope.com staff — 

It remains unclear whether, when, and where the UN Plastics Summit, which failed spectacularly in summer this year, will be continued. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has now set the date for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for 7 February 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland, a UN spokesperson told Plasteurope.com.

However, the spokesperson emphasised that no “substantive negotiations” are expected to take place at this meeting. The only plan is to elect a successor to the previous chair of the UN Plastics Summit, Luis Vayas Valdivieso. The diplomat from Ecuador resigned at the end of October after coming under heavy criticism for his handling of negotiations at the summit in Geneva. UNEP did not disclose which committees and organisations would be participating in the exploratory meeting in early February.

While it is currently not possible to estimate when the talks will resume, in an interview with PIE, the representative of an environmental protection organisation said the process could resume at the end of 2026, at the earliest.

Overall, negotiations for a global agreement to reduce plastics waste have so far been unsuccessful. On several occasions, the talks, which brought together several thousand delegates from around the world, had to be ended without concrete results. So far, it has not been possible to reconcile the widely divergent positions of the plastics-producing industrialised countries, such as the US, China, and Saudi Arabia in particular, on the one hand, and the developing countries, particularly those that suffer from plastics waste, on the other.