The gathering convened by the United Nations is the sixth round of talks, after a previous “final” conference in Busan, South Korea, failed last winter. In the interim, there have been numerous negotiations to wrangle down the proposed text of the treaty. This cuts down on the work that delegates need to do in person.
Almost every week seems to bring a new report that plastic is even worse than had been thought for both human and planetary health. This week, it’s a paper in the Lancet that warns of a “grave, growing” danger from the rising tide of the material, and puts its health-related economic costs at more than US$1.5 trillion ($1.93 trillion) a year.
Yet as diplomats gather today in Switzerland to negotiate an international treaty to tackle plastic pollution, the world seems further away from an agreement than it did when this process started three years ago.
