This is a pivotal event in the fight against plastic pollution. As France Info indicates, negotiations are opening this Monday, May 29 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, with a view to a legally binding global treaty on this environmental scourge. Until Friday, June 2, negotiators from 175 states are meeting to find solutions leading to an agreement hoped for by 2024.

“The challenge is to agree on a timetable – 2040, end of plastic pollution –, on the fact that the treaty must be binding, endowed with means and an expert body, and to obtain a sort of plastic Giec”, reported the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, to our colleagues. After a first session of negotiations which took place in early December 2022 in Uruguay, Paris is hosting the second of the five sessions planned in total.

While the debates initially focused on issues of governance, they should now extend to the main lines of the treaty. With 12 million tonnes of plastic waste entering the oceans every year and annual production more than doubling in twenty years to 460 million tonnes, the stakes are higher than ever. “If we do nothing, in 2060 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans,” warns Christophe Béchu again.

At the heart of the negotiations, 54 countries advocate a “reduction in the use and production of plastics”. But, faced with pressure from large industrial groups, interests are divergent since, on the other hand, some Asian countries, such as India, or the United States want less drastic measures by insisting on the need to recycle and fight against abandoned waste.

These countries “wish to remain within slightly broader obligations by leaving the possibility for States to decline the obligations as they see fit, which would obviously reduce the legal scope of the text, but also its material scope, that is to say its ambition”, summarizes with France Info Julien Rochette, director of the ocean program of the Institute of sustainable development and international relations.

As BFMTV reminds us, plastic also has a central role in global warming. It alone accounted for 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2019, or 3.4% of global emissions. A figure that could more than double by 2060, according to the OECD. In April, in Japan, the G7 had already set a goal of reducing plastic emissions into the environment to zero by 2040. A goal that could well be accelerated thanks to this week’s negotiations in Paris.