World Plastics Council calls on plastics treaty negotiators to focus on circularity

The World Plastics Council (WPC) has called on governments to focus on circularity in an effort to reach an “ambitious and implementable” global plastics treaty. The WPC made the comments in a statement July 29 ahead of the final scheduled round of negotiations on an international legally binding instrument to end plastics pollution by 2040.

The second part of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5.2) on a treaty to end plastic pollution will resume in Geneva on Aug. 4 following negotiators’ inability to reach an agreement in Busan, South Korea, in December 2024.

Benny Mermans, Chair of the WPC, called on negotiators to “steer away from contentious issues that threaten the historic opportunity to reach an agreement to end plastic pollution.”

The Busan talks broke down when governments could not agree on several key issues including an overall cap on plastics production.

“At the World Plastics Council we have spent the last two years bringing different stakeholders together to identify common ground and solutions to ending plastics pollution,” Mermans said. “To agree on an ambitious, implementable and equitable treaty, I would urge negotiators to focus on what unites us — building waste management capacity and the circular model we all aspire to.”

The WPC said in the statement that it believes circularity is the fastest and most affordable lever for accelerating the transition to a more sustainable plastics system and ending plastic pollution, while maintaining the utility that plastics offer society. Building circularity into the entire life cycle of plastics – from design, to recycling, to responsible end-of-life – and developing waste management systems “for the approximately 2.7 billion people who lack it,” should be the cornerstones of any agreement, it said.

“The most effective way to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable plastics system is for the treaty to significantly increase the value of plastic waste as a circular feedstock,” Mermans said. “The greater the economic value of plastic waste, the greater the incentive to not litter, landfill or incinerate, and to reuse and recycle instead. This will create a massive additional incentive to increase investment in waste management infrastructure and innovation, and drive growth and employment.”

A number of policy drivers are key to unlocking the value of plastic waste and accelerating the transition to a circular plastics system, according to the WPC. They include mobilizing sustainable finance mechanisms, driving demand for plastic waste through mandatory recycled content targets, taking an application-based approach to high-leakage plastics, enabling the international trade of recyclable feedstocks, and prioritizing product design.

Any agreement should also recognize that countries and regions face different challenges and require different solutions, the WPC said. “A one-size-fits-all global approach to policy and regulation cannot work, and this is why it must strike the right balance between global obligations and national measures,” it said. National action plans, tailored to each country’s unique circumstances and capabilities, should form the foundation of the agreement, it said.