Campaigners fear Trump will torpedo global plastics treaty as NZ’s ambitions wane

Saturday, 16 November 2024

Plastic production will treble by 2060 unless action is taken to stop it.

Expectations were already low that a global plastics treaty would be signed this year, and then Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

A group of “high ambition coalition” countries see a global treaty as a way of curtailing a global plastic pollution crisis, and will be pushing for one in negotiations starting on November 25 in Busan, South Korea.

They want to see the treaty ban the most toxic and damaging forms of plastic, and obligate countries to set binding targets on plastic production reduction, and a shift towards “circular” economies.

Those high ambition countries include Australia, Pacific states like Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, and, depending on who you ask, New Zealand.

But there are also countries now dubbed low ambition ‒ or in their own parlance, “like-minded” countries ‒ including manufacturing powerhouses like China and India, which have been accused of trying to wind back global treaty ambitions.

The low ambition countries also include oil producers Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, but a new low ambition colossus is emerging.

Donald Trump’s election as US president means there’s another superpower aligning with Russia, India and China having ‘low ambition’ for a strong global plastics treaty.

Among the moderately ambitious countries, the most important was the United States, which earlier this year under current US president Joe Biden shifted position, saying it favoured setting targets for global plastic production.

However, climate and pollution sceptic Trump is expected to reverse that position, and the US plastics industry now expects the US will fall in with the other petro-states.

Juressa Lee from Greenpeace, the chair of a global indigenous people’s forum on plastics, said: “It’s just not even on his radar. He has other things he’s interested in.”

Plastics have helped usher in the modern age, and their highest value uses, such as for medical devices or water bags in places without water infrastructure, are a cause for celebration.

But there is a tidal wave of plastics that is infiltrating oceans, other eco-systems, and even the human body and without action, global plastic production is expected to triple from 2019 levels by 2060.

Professor Trisia Farrelly from Massey University, said: “The science shows us that in order to offset the growing volumes of plastics infiltrating all of our eco-systems, our bodies, our food, everything, we have to take some pretty extraordinary measures.

Massey University environmental anthropologist Trisia Farrelly calls plastic recycling a myth, with all plastic created eventually having to be disposed of. “There is no perpetual circulation,” she says.

“Anything less than that will mean the growing accumulation of little pieces of plastics literally everywhere.

“It’s going to take a lot more than recycling. Recycling is a myth in terms of its success in addressing this global plastics crisis.”

The myth of recycling

As little as 10% of plastics ever produced have been recycled, Farrelly said, and plastic can only be recycled a certain number of times.

Consumer products carry messages promoting recycling, but reduction of plastic production and moving to circular and reusable systems of commerce are the real solutions, campaigners say.

“Even the most recyclable plastic can only be recycled a number of times before it has to be disposed of. There is no perpetual circulation,” she said.

And when even the most recyclable plastic is recycled, it loses some integrity, and needs new “virgin” plastic added to it.

“They don’t tell the public that. They don’t want the public to generally know that,” she said.

She said the producers ‒ who commonly stamp recycling messages on their packaging ‒ are giving people the impression that it is okay to keep producing plastic at scale, and cascading it into people’s homes, because of recycling.

“It drives me absolutely nuts,” Farrelly said.

The focus should be on using less, re-use, and banning the worst ones.

Auckland lawyer Lydia Chai tells Parliament's Environment Select Committee in June why politicians should ban exports of plastic to developing countries.

And even the recycling that is done is a problem.

Shipping our plastic pollution offshore

Many households chuck their waste plastic in the recycling bin, and then forget about it.

New Zealander Lydia Chai petitioned Parliament for a complete ban on plastic waste exports to developing countries because of the pollution it was causing, and the lack of environmental protections.

She impressed MPs on the environment committee, but they only recommended the Government introduce better monitoring of plastic waste exports, which hasn’t happened.

Even if all the plastic leaving our shores is recycled, which Chai doubts, plastic reprocessing is a dirty business, and plastic leaches into the environment around recycling facilities, even when they are state-of-the-art.

MPs heard New Zealand created much more plastic waste than it could deal with onshore, which had led to much ending up in landfills, or being exported, with about 98,000 tonnes exported from 2019 to mid-2021.

There’s a lot of out of sight, out of mind, about the plastic business.

There’s little data about plastic volumes, Farrelly said. There’s little disclosure from companies making and distributing it. There’s no transparency about the chemicals in plastics. And there’s very little visibility about what happens after people throw it in their recycling bins.

Waste trucks spirit away households’ recycling from kerb sides, at which point it becomes somebody else’s problem.

“It’s out of sight, out of mind for our waste. We just want it to disappear,” Farrelly said.

Greenpeace led a campaign to get single-use plastic bottles banned, advocating a move back to reusable bottle return schemes that were a feature of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

“We are complicit in waste dumping in less developed countries,.”

Action on the home front

At a country level, places like Australia and New Zealand are beginning to take action.

When in power, the Greens led a drive to develop a plastic packaging “stewardship” scheme, which remains in development and is likely to be deployed in 2026.

This, according Rob Langford, the chief executive of the Packaging Forum, will put a price on plastic.

It will be done through a levy system, with the money collected pushing up the price for the end consumer. The levies, which are higher on the most damaging kinds of plastics, will help pay for collection and recycling infrastructure, doing things like compensating councils for collecting it, and for recyclers to recycle it.

Langford said the work on the scheme remains ongoing under the current Government at the same pace it was going under the previous one.

Busan in South Korea is hosting the negotiations for a global plastics treaty.

Other stewardship schemes are being developed, with an e-waste scheme soon to launch officially.

A car tyre scheme is in action with tyres being reprocessed into other products, like matting for playground, though many collected tyres are burnt to fuel cement production.

Encouraging as these schemes may sound, Lee said too much of the focus remains on “downstream” things like recycling.

“Downstream solutions at the waste end are not sustainable,” she said.

Busan unlikely to see treaty signed

Farrelly said negotiations in Busan are unlikely to conclude positively, and more rounds of negotiations are likely. There’s just too much disagreement between high and low ambition countries.

Not everything rides on the treaty getting inked.

The EU, UK and some other high ambition countries are making changes, including preparing to work towards setting plastic production reduction targets for themselves.

Many have signed the Bridge to Busan declaration agreeing that the world cannot achieve its goals of ending plastic pollution and limiting global average temperature rise to less than 1.5° Celsius if the unsustainable production of primary plastic polymers is not addressed.

The declaration agreed to work towards a global objective regarding the sustainable production of primary plastic polymers, which could include “production freezes at specified levels, production reductions against agreed baselines, or other agreed constraints to prevent the unsustainable production of primary plastic polymers”.

But not all supposedly “high ambition” countries have signed, the Bridge to Busan official website shows.

Australia has signed. Norway has signed. The European Union has signed. The UK has signed. Fiji has signed.

The sea around Indonesia is one of the most plastic-polluted in the world, but microplastic pollution is a scourge that’s invisible to the naked eye.

New Zealand has not.

A 2024 European Union-funded position paper for the negotiations does not rate New Zealand as a high-ambition country.

No longer so ambitious

There was a change to New Zealand’s negotiating position with the change of government last year.

Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, chief executive of World Widelife Fund New Zealand, says countries need legally binding rules to limit plastic production.

The latest negotiating position Cabinet paper noted that: “global plastic production is expected to triple by 2060 (from 2019) levels, with less than half of this ending up in landfill, and only one-fifth recycled.”

It said New Zealand wanted an “ambitious, science-based” treaty, but it was heavily redacted with five of the 11 points on New Zealand’s negotiating position kept secret to protect the Government’s negotiating position.

But gone was some of the previous government’s ambitious language on moving to a global circular economy, avoiding “unnecessary” use of plastic, and enabling plastic re-use and repair.

Also gone was any reference to negotiating a treaty consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi, and language identifying Māori as having a special kaitiaki relationship with the land, or possessing indigenous knowledge that was important to sustainable management and protection of the environment.

“They joined the High Ambition Coalition, but I would like to ask them to leave it,” Lee said.

“The ambition since the change of government is significantly lower.”

What happens if plastic production is not stemmed globally?

WWF New Zealand chief executive Kayla Kingdon-Bebb said: “The amount of plastic in the ocean is expected to double in the next 15 years, and it’s estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish.”

“We need this treaty to ban the most harmful types of plastic, and we need it to create legally binding rules so that we limit how much plastic we create in the future.

“If we fall short, we're just going to be locking in decades of more plastic waste, chemical pollution, and avoidable harm to the health of our planet.”