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World leaders and industry executives will meet next week to negotiate the terms of a Global Plastics Treaty, a deal to address plastic pollution that 175 nations agreed last year to create and sign by the end of 2024. If the effort is effective, advocates say, it will have profound implications for how both fashion and beauty companies operate.
“This is one of the most consequential, important and high-profile battles with the fossil fuel industry that we have had in decades,” says Graham Forbes, global plastics project lead for Greenpeace USA. “What should happen coming out of this treaty process is that the world agrees to use significantly less plastic than we are currently. The fashion industry is going to need to rethink [its] business and its business model — and how it exists in a world where we use a lot less plastic and a lot less fossil fuel-based materials.”
The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) for the treaty, created by the UN Environment Program as part of a March 2022 resolution — titled ‘End plastic pollution: Towards an international legally binding instrument’ — to develop a global agreement for plastic pollution, kicks off its second meeting today in Paris. The first INC meeting took place in Uruguay in late 2022, with a total of five planned before the committee is expected to have a final draft ready by the end of 2024. For environmental groups, the highest priority is that the treaty ultimately focuses on reducing plastic production, rather than on mitigating its impacts — which is where industries that currently depend on plastic would like the focus to stay, sustainability advocates say.
“It’s very easy for our attention to be diverted to the wrong end of the pipe, and that’s what the plastics industry and the fossil fuel industry want us to focus on — this unfortunate occurrence of marine litter, microfibre pollution — when actually what we need to be looking at is: why is it caused in the first place?” says Sian Sutherland, co-founder of the nonprofit A Plastic Planet. “It is because we have become so dependent on this incredible but toxic and indestructible material. And, when we look at the world of fashion, I think very few people realise the scale of how much of our clothing is now made out of fossil fuel plastic.”
Greenpeace has called for five components it says are necessary for the Global Plastics Treaty to be effective: end plastic pollution; cap and phase down plastic production; ensure a just and inclusive transition to a low-carbon, zero-waste and reuse-based economy; and be firmly rooted in a human rights-based approach, with Indigenous communities disproportionately impacted by plastic pollution playing a key role in the entire negotiations process.
“Plastics pollution isn’t only completely unsustainably polluting, but it’s also completely unjust across the lifecycle, from communities living next to production facilities to waste-pickers at the end of life; communities are having plastic burned in open air facilities or living next to landfills or incinerators,” says Greenpeace’s Forbes. “These people are responsible for keeping the entire system from collapsing; we would be overwhelmed with plastic pollution [without them]. When we say just transition — it’s about empowering people to have a voice in a new system, so they can see themselves and their economic future in it. Those are some of the elements we want to see embedded in the treaty.”
Real solutions to a broken system
At a very minimum, Forbes says, the world needs to reduce its plastic production by 75 per cent from a 2017 baseline. To accomplish that, not only will single-use plastic packaging need to become history — in retail as well as internally and throughout the supply chain — but plastic-based ingredients and materials will be impacted as well. That will mean major reformulations for beauty and personal care products, which are often heavily reliant on petroleum-based ingredients. It will also require a wholesale transformation of how many brands produce clothes, considering polyester is the most common material used in fashion today and other synthetics — as well as the finishing chemicals used on many fabrics, including those made from natural fibres — are all derived from petroleum and leave the same long-lasting ecosystem footprint as the better-known plastic bag or bottle.
And recycled materials, a darling of sustainable fashion and centrepiece of its talk about circularity, are no cure-all, Forbes cautions.
“I do not see that being a fundamental shift. I see it much more protecting the status quo with a different wrapper on it,” he says. “There are thousands of chemicals of concern used to make polyester and plastics, and then there are thousands of other chemicals that are just completely unanalysed and also of concern. [Recycling textiles] sounds very much like the industry’s attempt to essentially protect the core business model, give it a different flavour — and it will do very little to protect people or the environment from the impacts of that type of business.”
Real solutions, Forbes argues, will ultimately require changing the entire pace and structure of the industry — redesigning products and processes, and adjusting not just production timelines but also profit expectations — because the current one is so fundamentally broken that replacing a few pieces within it does nothing to address the underlying problems.
“We need to accept the reality that any circular model that we are going to create needs to be a smaller and slower loop. That doesn’t work really well for shareholders, but that’s just the fundamental reality,” he says. “The first response is always to figure out what can be done to preserve the core business model, and preserve the extractive way of making a profit. It’s another way to continue doing business as usual under the guise of recycling.”
Red flags
In the leadup to the INC’s next meeting, there have already been some red flags, in both discussions of the substance of the treaty as well as in procedural rules for negotiating it, that have Forbes worried that it won’t match the scale of the problem. For example, UNEP released an “options paper” in April laying out potential measures to include in the treaty that Forbes says “downplayed some of the more ambitious calls for restrictions on plastic production, which is the critical element that we need to see”.
The paper — which will be the “basis of negotiation” at today’s meeting, says a spokesperson for the committee’s secretariat — was the “result of 67 written submissions from member states and includes 12 possible obligations”. The paper features both legally binding and voluntary measures, and includes the possibility of “phasing out the supply of plastic polymers, the use of problematic and avoidable plastic products, as well the production, consumption and use of chemicals and polymers of concern”, the spokesperson says; it also “considers financing needs and features suggested ways of implementing the 12 obligations”.
On the procedural side, the requirements and restrictions for attending the negotiations in Paris inherently favour industry over frontline communities and advocacy groups, says Forbes. “These processes are almost inherently exclusive. You have so much inequity in who can show up,” Forbes says, from visa-related hurdles and the financial resources involved in travel to new rules restricting the number of people that can represent any one NGO. “The consequence of that is going to be very much to elevate voices from the fossil fuel industry and producing industries, at the expense of civil society groups, of scientists, of the folks that really have the public interest at heart. So, access is a massive concern.”
The secretariat’s spokesperson says it’s “essential” for all stakeholders to be engaged in the process: “The INC secretariat is working to enable their participation within the limitations of the meeting venue,” adding that 45 per cent of participants on-site “at any given time” will be observers, and 55 per cent will be from government delegations.
“Within the funding available, the Secretariat was also able to provide financial support to some non-governmental observer organisations from developing countries to facilitate participation of stakeholders from such countries.” Plenary sessions will be webcast and the INC Secretariat, with the support of the host government, has organised a virtual platform to enable access for registered participants unable to attend in person.
Dozens of businesses, financial institutions and NGOs, including some of the world’s biggest companies — L’Oréal, Unilever, Pepsico and Mars, among others — have formed an alliance that says it supports the development of the treaty. The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty calls the process a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to address the plastic crisis. However, its vision statement focuses on “a circular economy for plastic”, a system in which plastic “never becomes waste or pollution, and the value of products and materials is retained in the economy”. Forbes says this language keeps the focus on how to manage waste — the approach that advocates have been cautioning against — rather than on preventing the creation of plastic in the first place.
The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty supports reducing plastic use and production “as a prerequisite for being able to safely circulate the remaining plastics”, according to John Duncan, secretariat co-lead for the initiative. “That’s why the companies who are members of the coalition are calling for a legally binding treaty that includes global rules and measures to drive change on a global scale,” he says. “It is clear that reduction is a critical piece of the solution because we can’t rely on recycling alone to solve this global crisis. By reducing the use of all virgin plastic, focusing particularly on plastics produced from fossil fuels, we will be on a better path toward staying within the 1.5°C. We can start by prioritising the elimination of problematic plastics that are most likely to end up in our environment, while also focusing on reducing the demand for the short-lived plastics that never circulate.”
The coalition is also calling for standards on product design, he adds, and for “proper processes” to be put in place for plastics already in circulation so that chemicals and other additives within them do not get recycled and then pose a risk to human health or nature.
Researchers and advocates will be working in Paris to hold the line throughout the week — and public momentum is starting to build. A video released by Greenpeace today features actor Lupita Nyong’o talking about the negotiations in Paris, what’s at stake and what the treaty needs to look like to be effective.
The negotiations will cover a lot of ground, but a telltale sign will be how the draft text’s “core obligations” are defined. For Forbes, key language to watch for is around capping and restricting the production of plastics and petroleum-based chemicals.
“If we don’t do that, everything else will fail,” he says; and if it succeeds, it will result in the larger business transformations that are so necessary. “If the treaty is effective, there will need to be a reckoning in the industry around its relationship to fossil fuel-based materials.”
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