September 2025
August’s extended fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5.2) in Geneva was meant to be a turning point, the moment the world would unite behind a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty and agree to a comprehensive set of measures to regulate plastics across their lifecycles.
Instead, the talks ended in deadlock, with no agreement and a growing sense of urgency about how the world can tackle a pressing environmental threat.
After three years, six rounds of negotiations and many millions invested in the process, in the early hours of the morning on the final day of negotiations, delegates were still a long way away from being able to agree on a treaty.
While the narrative following the meeting has largely focused on the merit of walking away from a weak deal, the outcome still leaves major questions about the way forward.
There is no date for a future meeting and, more concerningly, there’s no reason why we should expect another meeting to yield a different result, leaving the future of the talks – and of the fate of our collective effort to end plastic pollution – hanging in the balance.
The role of obstructionism
With more than 100 countries supporting measures to reduce plastic production and large numbers backing proposals on decision-making, products and chemicals, one could wonder how we still managed to leave Geneva with no agreement, but we need not look far for the answers.
Despite the best efforts of high ambition countries, a small but powerful bloc of petrochemical-producing countries, backed by a formidable presence of fossil fuel lobbyists, played a decisive role in derailing progress.
Their tactics involved diluting ambition, using consensus as a veto on progress and embedding industry interests, ensuring that the Chair’s compromise text was stripped of enforceable measures. While the usual suspects of Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran were pushing back against ambition, they were joined this time around by the USA as a powerful voice in ensuring global binding measures were pushed off the table.
Civil society and high-ambition countries, including the UK, EU and many from the Global South, pushed back, but with the rules of the game rigged against them they faced a futile attempt to find agreement, where the ambitious countries kept offering concessions and those who wanted no treaty held a firm line in return. Moreover, calls to move beyond consensus, championed by 120 countries and led by Latin America, were fiercely resisted.
The UK’s role: Between ambition and ambiguity
The UK played a critical role in the negotiations, not only bringing UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Water and Flooding Emma Hardy to the session and strongly rejecting the initial weak proposal for a new Chair’s text but also showing leadership in advancing discussions on product design, reuse, emissions and releases across the plastics lifecycle and sea-based sources of plastic pollution, while also showing some flexibility on the financial mechanism.
The UK negotiating team clearly came prepared and willing to engage in good-faith negotiations towards a successful outcome.
However, many countries did the same and still left Geneva empty-handed. Now is a time for major soul-searching and leadership before committing to another round of negotiations.
The treaty is not dead but it is critically ill.
While several pathways exist for where we go next – from exploring a potential Protocol at the Basel Convention to a treaty outside of the UN system or even using the United Nations General Assembly as an alternative route – one thing is fundamentally clear: we cannot keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
To advance negotiations and secure a meaningful Global Plastics Treaty, countries must pursue pathways that ensure a minority is unable to hold the talks hostage and veto progress for the rest. In short, we must break the de-facto reliance on consensus-based decision-making if we are to ever have a meaningful treaty.
The next few months should be focused on re-grouping and re-strategising, with many looking to countries such as the UK to play a key role in spearheading diplomatic efforts to find a path forward. In that effort, we urge the UK to choose courage over consensus.
Our goal should still be to find a comprehensive global approach covering the full lifecycle of plastics and supporting all countries in an equitable and just transition.
In the meantime, work can begin without delay to align domestic policy with the treaty goals promoted by countries such as the UK, including committing to reduce production, ending plastic waste exports and transitioning to a genuine safe and circular economy.
Christina Dixon is Ocean Campaign Lead at Environmental Investigation Agency
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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