Momentum sagging at UN plastic pollution treaty talks

Negotiations about making a turning point agreement to combat the scourge of plastic pollution were stumbled on Saturday, progress is slow and countries were crazy about how far the proposed agreement should go.

The negotiations opened on Tuesday have four working days to hit a legally binding instrument to solve the growing problem with the environment.

In a blunt middle assessment, President Luis Valdivieso warned 184 countries in the United Nations that they have to change to make an agreement.

“Progress has not been enough.” He said.

“A real pressure is required to achieve our common goal.”

“Some articles still have unresolved problems and show little progress to achieve a common understanding.”

Key breakage is among the countries that want to focus on waste management and others who want a more ambitious treaty that interrupts production and eliminates the use of the most toxic chemicals.

And with interviews based on finding a consensus, it became a Brinkmanship game.

A diplomatic source told journalists that many informal meetings were mixed together to try and break the dead end for Sundays.

“If nothing changes, we can’t get there,” the source added.

– Parenthesis War –

The countries gathered again in Geneva after the so -called fifth and recent negotiations in South Korea and Busan in 2024.

After four days of interviews, the draft text was ballooned 22 to 35 pages-As the country’s contradictory demands and ideas added contradictory demands and ideas, the number of parentheses in the text increased to approximately 1,500 with an increase of five times more.

Negotiations have to look at the full life cycle of plastic from production to pollution, but some countries are not so satisfied with such a wide scope.

Kuwait is an ambiguous set of countries that reject the limits of spoke-production for a similar thinking group and want to focus on waste treatment.

Kuwait, “Let’s decide what we can accept. Consensus must be the basis of all our decisions.”

Drived in the same direction, Saudi Arabia, speaking for the Arab Group, the next responsible road of the text of the text “uncompromising Iraq due to the final result may not reach the final result,” he said.

However, considering how little it was in reality, Uruguay has warned that the union of consensus can not be used as a justification to avoid achieving our goals “.

Eirik Lindebjerg, a global plastic advisor worldwide, said that the proposal of the group that thinks similar to AFP was “another initiative to make it a waste management agreement” and to suppress negotiations to reduce the amount of plastic in circulating.

– Way for fog –

The UN Environmental Program hosts negotiations and quickly held a press conference after the stock session.

UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said that an agreement was “really in our understanding, even though it doesn’t seem like this today.”

“I am really encouraged despite the negotiations,” he said to journalists, “There is a way for success.”

Vayas added: “We need to accelerate. We need a better rhythm in this, and we must finally work in a way that we will deliver.”

Later, IPEN General Manager Bjorn Beler, a global network aiming to limit toxic chemicals, told AFP: “This process could not make a decision and still gathered ideas. We are sleeping towards a cliff and we do not wake up.”

– ‘profits without poisoning’ –

Plastic pollution is so common that microplastics are found in the highest mountain peaks, the deepest ocean trench and are scattered to almost every part of the human body.

Every year, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced globally, half of them are for disposable products.

Plastic production has doubled until 2060.

Panama’s negotiator Juan Monterrey Gomez took the ground to hit countries that want to prevent the treaty from covering the entire plastic life cycle.

Microplastics said that “he said in our blood, in our lungs and a newborn child in the first cry. Our body is proof of a system that makes a profit from poisoning us”.

“We cannot recycle our way out of this crisis.”

RJM/IM/GV