Weekly Blog - 4 September 2025 - Plastic Talks
After three years of negotiations, crucial UN Plastics Treaty talks stalled last month. In our latest guest blog Lucy Tanner, a wonderful Christian lobbyist with Tearfund, fresh back from the talks, explores why, and where we go next.
Plastics Treaty
As the sun rose over Lake Geneva on the 15th August 2025, exhausted delegates and observers awoke at 5.30am (if indeed they had slept) to hear the news that, once again, countries had failed to reach agreement on a global treaty to end plastic pollution. Whilst this was not a surprise given the events of the preceding ten days, the sense of disappointment and regret was profound. Overnight, the latest in a series of draft treaty texts had been roundly rejected by all countries, having achieved the dubious distinction of having crossed everyone’s red lines all at once! We left Geneva with no clear sense of the way forward, the meeting having been adjourned, to convene again at a later date.
You would be forgiven for not having been aware of these events. The story made the headlines briefly before the news cycle moved on. We’d been here before. The previous and presumed-to-be-final round of talks had reached a similar conclusion in South Korea at the end of 2024. In fact these negotiations began officially back in November 2022, with the foundations having been laid some seven months before that.
Despite an auspicious start, negotiations on a plastics treaty have proceeded with great difficulty, constrained by lengthy debates about scope and process, and held up by a misguided commitment to making decisions by consensus rather than allowing for a vote when consensus cannot be reached - effectively allowing a minority of countries to block any agreement. The talks have been flooded with representatives from the petrochemical industry and held up by oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, who resolutely reject any attempts to curtail plastic production. Even the latest draft text, which took a very low ambition approach, still proved too much for them.
So you might be wondering why have so many hours of blood, sweat and tears (along with roughly US $40m) been poured into a treaty many believe can never be agreed?
Plastic pollution crisis
Because the problem is huge and getting worse. Despite the warnings from scientists, environmentalists and health experts, more and more plastic continues to be pushed into the market, half of it designed to be used just once before being discarded. Between 2000 and 2019 plastic production doubled to 460 million tonnes and is set to reach 736 million tonnes by 2040. The well-documented consequences of plastic - its production, use and disposal - on our bodies, our ecosystems and our climate are devastating. We simply cannot afford to do nothing.
Hundreds of dedicated NGOs, environmentalists, humanitarians and scientists have been involved in the treaty negotiations, united around the conviction that plastic pollution poses a huge threat to our planet and its inhabitants. Their presence has been crucial in maintaining momentum to reach an agreement and providing support to 120+ ambitious delegations to hold the line.
Tearfund’s involvement has been driven by the impact of plastic pollution on people living in poverty. As with climate change, the impacts of plastic pollution are felt first and hardest by the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. It blights their health, their livelihoods and their neighbourhoods. Around the world some 2 billion people don’t have access to a solid waste collection service, leaving them with little other option but to dump or burn it in the open environment. Every minute, enough plastic waste to cover a football pitch is openly dumped or burnt in Sub Saharan Africa. Mismanaged waste leads to up to a million deaths a year – that’s one person every 30 seconds. It also affects the livelihoods of 40 million waste pickers - informal workers who collect, sort and sell materials for recycling or reuse and are the backbone of the world’s recycling systems.
There is no easy fix to the plastic pollution crisis, as these negotiations have shown. Voluntary and national measures have failed to deal with the scale and complexity of the problem. Approximately 80% of the plastic produced since the 1950s has ended up in landfills, the oceans, loose in the environment or openly burned. And despite what the marketing people would have us believe, less than a tenth has been recycled. What’s urgently needed is ambitious, legally-binding, global action that tackles what is known as the “full lifecycle of plastic”. Such action would have a profound impact not only on the pollution crisis but also on climate change and biodiversity loss.
Don't give up hope
For none of the crises currently affecting humanity are disconnected from one another - and nor should we as Christians be disconnected from them. I see my work on the treaty as outworking of my call to be a steward of God’s creation and to love my neighbour as myself. It’s one expression of my “true and proper worship” (Roms 12: 1), as I wait for the day Christ returns to renew all things.
And so, whilst we wait for a treaty to end plastic pollution we can all play our part in filling the gap through our daily habits and actions, as individuals and as faith communities - leading action at the local level, advocating for national legislation, considering ways in which we can support affected communities globally and maintaining pressure for future multilateral negotiations. A global circular economy agreement to include the outcomes of these crucial plastics treaty negotiations is something Arise advocates for as part of our Four Shifts campaign. And the importance of supporting multilateral process like the talks was explored in a recent Arise blog.
At a session to review progress mid-way through the Geneva talks, Juan Pablo Monterrey Gómez from Panama declared - in one of his now trademark motivational interventions - that “a treaty without production measures will be built on sand”. As Christians we have a particular appreciation of the foolishness and danger of building on the sand. And as much as the world urgently needs a plastics treaty, no deal is better than a weak deal.
Speculation is rife as to what is next for the negotiations. It is difficult to see how progress can be made by continuing to follow the same formula so is it time to try something different? Might a new path be forged by those countries who are committed to pressing forward? Looking back, I can see that the sunrise over Lake Geneva in fact brought hope - hope that the time and effort invested to date by so many from both government and civil society will not be in vain and that those with the will to do so can yet build a treaty on rock.
All views expressed are Lucy’s personal opinions and don’t necessarily represent the views of Tearfund.
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