GENEVA: Delegates negotiating the world’s first legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution are heading into a high‑stakes stocktake plenary with a daunting reality. The latest Assembled Text released in the early hours of Saturday shows not convergence, but a proliferation of disagreements.
The new draft — which compiles the outputs of four contact groups after days of line‑by‑line wrangling — bristles with bracketed text, the tell‑tale markers of unresolved options. According to a count, there are more than 1,500 bracketed sections in the Assembled Text, up from roughly 370 in the Chair’s Text tabled last December. Each set of brackets represents competing phrases, entire clauses, or even whole paragraphs still up for negotiation.
Expanded preamble, broader scope
Compared to the Chair’s version, the Assembled Text reflects a greatly expanded preamble. It introduces new concepts: recognition of “mountain environments” alongside marine ecosystems, detailed human rights references — from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the right to a clean, healthy environment — and explicit mention of vulnerable groups such as waste pickers, coastal communities, and people of African descent.
The Chair’s original wording was more concise, largely focusing on existing multilateral environmental agreements and sustainable development. Now, multiple alternative formulations sit side by side in brackets, underscoring ideological divides over how far the treaty’s values and scope should extend.
Core disagreements persist
The very purpose of the treaty remains unsettled. Should it “end” plastic pollution, “address” it, or “protect human health and the environment from its detrimental effects”? References to “sustainable development” and “equity” appear in some versions but not others. The Chair’s simpler December text — to protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution based on a comprehensive life‑cycle approach — has now splintered into a tangle of possible formulations.
Product bans, phase‑outs & national flexibility
Article 3 (Problematic Plastic Products) in both drafts contains long sub‑lists of criteria for banning or restricting certain items, such as single‑use cutlery, plastic‑stemmed cotton buds, and microbeads. In the new text, there are even more qualifiers — for example, factors like food and water security, cultural feasibility, availability and affordability of alternatives — each of which is bracketed, reflecting North–South divides.
Developing countries, supported by broader coalition language, argue for flexibility based on “national circumstances, capacities, and socio‑economic considerations,” insisting that obligations must be matched with means of implementation. The Chair’s earlier draft had cleaner, more unified provisions.
Financial mechanism still in flux
The Assembled Text retains — and expands — competing models for financing. A new dedicated multilateral fund, designation of the Global Environment Facility, hybrid arrangements, and timelines for transition. While the Chair’s Text already had several “option” clauses here, the current version adds more detail on grants, concessional loans, and replenishment formulas, as well as political bracket fights over who must contribute and on what basis.
Broader political overlay
Some of the most contentious new language concerns “unilateral coercive measures,” “sovereignty,” and explicit condemnations of trade restrictions. These reflect heightened geopolitical sensitivities since December, as negotiations have increasingly intersected with trade, development, and human rights debates.
Melissa Blue Sky, Senior Attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law noted that after four days of negotiations, the draft text is going in the opposite direction of what’s needed to finalize a treaty.
The text went from 22 to 35 pages in length and at a time when we should be moving to agreement, countries are adding hundreds more brackets, indicating places of disagreement, she said.
Troublingly, Melissa added, the draft text is misleading because it presents all options as having the same weight, when in fact, some text additions have the support of over a hundred countries and some with only one. An effort to include an article on scope with the goal of limiting the treaty to start at product design, rather than the full lifecycle of plastic has been given a placeholder.
Heading into plenary, it is unclear whether Member States will agree to use the text as the basis for ongoing negotiations, give the Chair a mandate to prepare a new text, or something else. The INC cannot continue with the status quo and expect the negotiations to result in a final treaty. Something will have to change for us to see a treaty text that meaningfully delivers on the promise to end plastic pollution, she added.
What’s next
As delegates face the stocktake plenary, negotiators will need to start stripping away brackets in real time. Observers warn that unless parties can converge on core provisions — the treaty’s objective, product control measures, and the finance-capacity-technology package — talks risk sliding toward a lowest common denominator outcome.