Members of the United Nations have finished another round of negotiations on a treaty to reduce global plastic pollution.
Over 2,500 people participated in the six-day session in April in Canada, including Recycle Hawaiʻi's Executive Director Kristine Kubat. You may remember we talked to Kubat last year after she attended a previous session in France.
The Canada event was the fourth of five sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. For the first time, talk shifted from ideas to treaty language.
"There is a broad range of positioning. On the one end of the spectrum, you have what we call the petrostates, so these are like Saudi Arabia, Russia, places that produce a lot of oil, and their incomes depend on oil production, or their gross domestic product is very tied up in oil production. Plastic comes from oil. I think people know that by now," she said.
"On the other end of the spectrum, you would have people who don't live in countries that produce oil, that have very little to do with it, that actually use very little oil or very little plastic in their lives, who are being heavily impacted."
Nations agreed to keep working between now and the next committee meeting in late November in South Korea, where negotiations are set to conclude.
"I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're pretty far away from that happening. And so there might be another round of negotiations," Kubat said. "I think it could be a couple years before we would see anything mandated by the treaty kicking in to have an impact on the plastic pollution problem."
However, she said the negotiations serve another purpose: signaling to the market.
"I don't think it will be that long before we see significant private sector progress being made," Kubat told HPR. "Much of what we hope to achieve to reduce plastic can actually be accomplished through the marketplace, through different economies, local and nationwide."
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 22, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
