UN plastic treaty negotiations end in failure, again

Representatives from 184 countries recently gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to tackle the growing plastic crisis. The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC 5.2) went into overtime but failed to produce an agreement. Two main issues were supposed to be resolved by this, the last scheduled round of negotiations: whether the treaty should include a cap on the production of new plastic and how to address concerns about chemicals in plastic. More than 100 member states of the so-called High Ambition Coalition advocated for a binding treaty to cap plastic production and impose restrictions on dangerous chemicals used in plastic. Another group of “like-minded countries,” composed of petrochemical-producing countries including Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, instead pushed to simply