Democrats are pushing Biden to take a firmer stance on plastic waste in key negotiations

Democratic senators are calling on the Biden administration to push for an ambitious deal at key United Nations talks on plastic pollution now underway in Ottawa, Canada.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told The Hill that the world needs the United States to commit to a strong treaty to reduce plastic waste amid growing health and environmental concerns, but warned that the administration’s current negotiation strategy risks giving polluters a “veto” over the process.

The US, he said, has bound itself with “self-imposed restrictions [that] work for the benefit of the industry” the talks aim to regulate.

If the status quo continues, scientists project that plastic production will double by mid-century, and waste in the ocean will triple by 2040. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Iran lead a coalition that is pushing against limits on plastic production.

Last week, Whitehouse joined Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (DN.Y.) in asking negotiators to “focus on getting the deal more as possible”. In comments to The Hill, the Rhode Island senator argued that such an ambitious treaty could also spur Congress to pass new legislation of its own.

Days after lawmakers issued their call, however, the State Department pledged to pursue a deal that would ensure unanimous approval, apparently abandoning the possibility of a tougher standard that can only win over most countries who participate in the conversations, instead of all. they.

In doing so, Whitehouse said, the White House “just gave the worst-behaving participants in the process a veto they know they can count on, no matter how unreasonably it is used.”

He added that “there has been no exploration of alternatives, nothing that might rattle the cages or cause some anxiety to potential obstructionists.”

In a response to The Hill, the State Department said it did not comment on communications with Congress.

But the agency confirmed it was seeking a treaty with “universal membership, including the largest producers and consumers of plastic products and the main sources of plastic pollution”.

The administration did not provide more clarity on the specific policies it advocated in the treaty.

Time is running out for talks on plastics, which are part of a United Nations Environment Program framework that aims to address the growing amounts of harmful plastics in the world’s waters and human bodies.

Last week, Whitehouse joined other Democratic senators at the fourth round of the Intergovernmental Negotiations Committee (INC-4) in Ottawa, where world leaders discuss public health officials, civil society groups and the powerful lobby petrochemical, which has been a growing increase. strength in conversations.

The negotiators are divided between two camps: the nations of the global south, the advocates of public health and the environment, on the one hand, and the producers of plastics and the main oil producers, on the other.

The first camp, the High Ambition Coalition of 60 countries, wants to reduce the production and consumption of plastics to “sustainable levels”, largely by reducing single-use plastics used for packaging and consumer goods. It also wants to ban the types of dangerous additives that make plastic unsafe to recycle, and huge investment in new systems and facilities for its reuse and recycling.

The second group, which calls itself “Like Minded Countries”, is made up of major petrochemical producers such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. These groups oppose production limits or chemical bans and want the treaty to focus “only on tracking plastic waste,” according to Reuters.

The ongoing INC-4 conference has 196 participants from the petrochemical industry, according to analysis by the International Environmental Law Center.

That’s almost 40 percent more than at the last round of talks, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in November.

Industry groups have backed the effort to reach an agreement to reduce plastic waste. Members of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, for example, have pushed for a binding global deal on plastics, arguing that both voluntary business commitments and a patchwork of national regulations have failed to address the plastics crisis.

But industry representatives have also opposed plastic production limits that members of the High Ambition Coalition see as a necessary ingredient to stem the rise of plastic pollution.

US negotiators have also rejected the production restriction, according to researcher Douglas McCauley of the University of California, Berkeley.

A tool published by the University of California, Berkeley, which McCauley co-produced, helps showcase a portfolio of “choose your own adventure” solutions to help reduce plastic waste by mid-century from its current increasing trajectory to at a fraction of its current level.

According to this analysis, plastic waste can be largely eliminated from the environment by limiting the production of “virgin” plastics from fossil fuels to current levels, by requiring that all new plastics contain 40 percent recycled materials, charging producers for the waste they produce and channeling the money into much greater waste collection technologies and practices, particularly in the Global South.

So far, the U.S. delegation has looked at all of these alternatives, although they have been “most strongly opposed to production limits,” McCauley said.

He acknowledged that the State Department delegation was very willing to listen to public health and environmental researchers. “But I can’t say they’re listening to us,” he said.

Citing about a dozen conversations with negotiators, he said they seem most interested in urging each country to pursue its own strategy, a stance he said contrasts with the Biden administration’s aggressive rhetoric about the importance of the justice and environmental equity.

The treaty offers victories in both domains for the Biden administration, “and yet, there is a complete absence of American leadership,” McCauley said.

“What we feel is that instead of coming together, trying to resolve this as an international community in the context of the treaty, their preference is to figure out how we can establish domestic laws? So, for example: What could we do within the U.S. for domestic politics?

In his comments to The Hill, Whitehouse acknowledged the difficulty of limiting plastic production. Plastics are woven into every part of modern life, from automobiles and computers and windmill blades to clothing and medical devices.

But he argued that negotiators should still work to set aggressive limits. “I think production limits and ultimately ending the production of the most dangerous and least recyclable, starting with the ones that are used the most, would be a very logical outcome.”

Reducing pollution, Whitehouse argued, is often a bipartisan concern in the United States. Bipartisan majorities passed the 2015 Microbe-Free Water bill, which banned tiny plastic particles from cosmetics, and the 2022 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, by which countries agreed to eliminate gradually hydrofluorocarbons that destroy ozone.

An ambitious treaty in the INC process, Whitehouse said, would create momentum for Congress to take action “to catch up with the rest of the world” and remove the legs of industry opposition, because the producers of plastics and fossil fuels would have to follow the rules of the treaties in other signatory countries around the world.

“It would be more difficult for the plastics industry, and for the fossil fuel industry, which is essentially the supplier of the plastics industry, to prevent us from reaching a standard that almost every developed country in the world had already agreed to.” he said

This treaty, he said, “would distort the markets so that it would be easier for the plastics industry to accept the change in American law because they would have to trade their products for the countries that were making the treaty. There are many ways in which we would be helpful.”

He argued that such an agreement would be useful even if all the countries involved in the negotiations did not sign it, because those who did would form a zone of “high ambition” that would put pressure on the rest.

“You could always be made to continue with the treaty without consensus. It is believed that the consensus of a very small minority is being unreasonably withheld,” he said.

Even if countries see consensus as the ideal way forward, he added, there is room for a bifurcated deal in which more ambitious countries push harder.

“We can go: OK, this is the best we could do with the unreasonable, unreasonable minority. But for nations that want to proceed to a more responsible standard: we’ll just go ahead and do this split level, with the countries more advanced just going ahead and agreeing to their best plan among themselves without the need for buy-in from Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia.”

McCauley, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, contrasted the US position in Ottawa with the country’s role in the UN climate negotiations, where, despite concerted opposition from other fossil fuel-exporting countries, played a key role in driving the November admission by all the world’s governments that fossil fuels were at the root of the climate crisis.

The country has yet to take a similar role on plastics, he said, warning that this could hamper negotiators’ ability to produce a strong final deal. Because nations like Iran and Russia “are trying to derail the process, without the United States facing this clear opposition force, there’s really no hope that we’ll get there,” he said.