Plastic waste is everywhere. Each year, around 400 million metric tons of it end up in landfills and places like oceans, rivers and shorelines. The trash breaks down into tiny pieces called microplastics that have made their way into every corner of the environment and even into human bodies.
The problem is getting worse. So last year the United Nations set out to write a legally binding agreement to deal with the issue. That decision by U.N. member states "will clearly take us towards a future with no plastic pollution," Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, Japan's then-environment minister, said at the time.This week, negotiators from around 150 countries are gathering in Kenya to start hashing out the treaty's details. Outside groups are there too, trying to influence the talks, including public health advocates, human rights activists, environmentalists and the oil and gas industry.
Almost every piece of plastic is made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Now, there's growing concern among those who want deep cuts in plastic waste that plastic producers and some consumer goods companies could weaken the treaty.
A constellation of groups trying to shape the negotiations can be traced back to the oil and gas industry. That includes some of the world's largest oil and gas companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and France's TotalEnergies. And major oil-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, are at the negotiating table. They push a similar message: The problem of plastic pollution can be solved through recycling and other forms of waste management rather than through substantial cuts in new plastic production.
But years of research and investigations, including by NPR, have shown that recycling is failing to rein in plastic waste. Reducing how much new plastic gets made in the first place is a "prerequisite" to getting pollution under control, says Carsten Wachholz, who works at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and co-leads the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty.
The fossil fuel industry has a track record of slowing environmental action. In the 1990s, it worked to make sure the United States didn't ratify the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce climate pollution. And at last year's U.N. climate summit in Egypt, countries agreed to a watered-down final agreement after oil- and gas-producing nations beat back calls for a phaseout of fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming.
The challenge in these negotiations is coming up with a plan that's effective in cutting plastic waste and that also gets buy-in from all the countries involved. "The worst-case scenario is that some of the oil- and gas-producing countries would say, 'This is so [diametrically opposed] to our interests, we will drop out,'" Wachholz says.
The U.S. was the world's biggest oil and gas producer in 2022, and the State Department, too, has called for recycling to play a big part in the plastics treaty — or risk having it fall flat.
"An agreement that relies solely on production caps might diminish participation in a future agreement, as well as the ambition of the agreement itself, thereby risking progress toward our common goal of addressing plastic pollution," a spokesperson said in a statement last week.
Plastic threads through every aspect of modern life, from food wrappers to medical devices, from cigarette butts to disposable diapers. Plastic production is on track to triple by 2060, while the amount of waste that's being dumped in the environment continues to soar.
Oil and gas companies see the petrochemical sector, which includes plastics, as crucial to their bottom line. As climate-friendly technologies like electric vehicles grow more popular, the oil and gas sector faces a future of declining demand for products such as gasoline and diesel fuel, demand for which is expected to peak later this decade.
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