More than 150 countries failed to agree on a plan to cut plastic pollution

For almost two years, countries have been trying to negotiate a United Nations treaty to rein in plastic pollution. The talks were supposed to end with an agreement, but that didn't happen.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For two years now, countries have been trying to negotiate a United Nations treaty to rein in plastic pollution. The talks were supposed to end with an agreement on Sunday in South Korea. That did not happen. Here to help us understand why the talks stalled and what comes next is Michael Copley from NPR's climate desk. Hey there.

MICHAEL COPLEY, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.

KELLY: Start with the scale of the challenge. The world produces so much plastic waste. It feels like it's everywhere you look.

COPLEY: Yeah. I mean, in so many places, plastic pollution is piled up on beaches and riverbanks, but it also breaks down into tiny pieces that have gotten into the food system and into human bodies. So it is everywhere, and the amount of waste is growing.

KELLY: OK, so yuck. It sounds like everyone agrees this is a problem. Why so much trouble getting to a deal?

COPLEY: It really comes down to the fact that countries have different ideas about what this treaty should do. So there's a big group of countries that want binding limits on plastic production so that the amount of waste is more manageable. They also want to phase out some harmful chemicals that are used in plastic. Those were some of the demands outlined by a negotiator from Rwanda, Juliet Kabera. She's the director general of the Rwanda Environment Management Authority.

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JULIET KABERA: It is time we take it seriously and negotiate a treaty that is fit for purpose and not built to fail.

COPLEY: You know, Kabera got a standing ovation from a lot of the negotiators in South Korea. But there's another group that sees these issues very differently.

KELLY: Right. Let's talk about them now. And I was doing a little bit of reading on this, and reading the obvious point - plastic is made from oil and gas. Is that part of the division in these talks?

COPLEY: Yeah, that's a big part of it. You know, fossil fuel producers and plastic companies don't want this treaty to hurt demand for their products, so they're firmly opposed to any sort of cap on manufacturing. What they say is the world needs all the plastic that they can make. And so they want these talks to really focus on waste management, like recycling. Here's Saudi Arabia's negotiator Abdulrahman Al Gwaiz.

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ABDULRAHMAN AL GWAIZ: There should be no problem with producing plastics because the problem is the pollution, not the plastics themselves.

COPLEY: But industry experts say, you know, the plastic sector has been talking for a long time about waste management, and recycling especially has never lived up to its promise. Less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally.

KELLY: Less than 10%. I know...

COPLEY: Yeah.

KELLY: ...NPR, other news organizations - we've all done a lot of work investigating this. Why has that solution not worked?

COPLEY: A lot of it comes down to money. You know, it's relatively cheap to make new plastic, so it's often less expensive for companies to use new plastic rather than recycled plastic. And NPR and other groups investigating this issue have found that the industry has known for years that recycling probably wouldn't work on a large scale but that the industry pitched it as a solution to avoid regulation and to keep demand growing. In the U.S. recently, there have been some lawsuits accusing the industry of misleading the public about recycling. California sued Exxon Mobil. And in Kansas, Ford County recently sued Exxon and a couple of other industry players.

KELLY: And the industry response has been what?

COPLEY: You know, Exxon says court cases won't solve this problem, says they're investing a lot of money to improve recycling, cut down on waste. We've heard similar comments from industry groups - that the recycling investigations we just talked about don't really reflect today's industry. The concern among environmental activists is that nothing about the economics of recycling has changed. And so if companies don't have to use recycled material, the concern is they're often going to opt for using new plastic instead.

KELLY: So what happens - they keep negotiating? The treaty may come, may never come. We don't know?

COPLEY: Yeah, they keep negotiating. So the - another round of talks is expected sometime next year. So countries and interest groups are going to continue trying to build support for their positions in the coming months. But what we saw in South Korea is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what this treaty should do. And it's not clear right now how those differences get resolved. And right now these talks require consensus to get anything done. So unless that changes, one side is going to need to make some big concessions to reach a deal.

KELLY: All righty. That is Michael Copley from NPR's climate desk.

COPLEY: Thanks, Mary Louise. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.