Three years ago, the international effort to create a binding treaty to end plastic pollution started with an explosion of hope. Last year it collapsed. This has stalled the birth of an agreement that could begin to rein in production of a fossil-fuel-based material that is harming ecosystems on every part of Earth.
The treaty seemed to be the latest victim of a struggling multilateral system. Shifting geopolitics, changing national positions and the global influence of fossil fuels are frustrating the broader work of curbing climate change – humanity’s common interest.
I reported on the plastics negotiations over this period, watching as 184 countries seemed increasingly unable to find common ground. With so much at stake, one absence in particular seemed to weaken the process: the ability, when countries could not reach full consensus, to make a decision anyway based on a two-thirds majority vote.
Arcane as it sounds, this omission lurked behind some of the most dramatic negotation scenes, and still haunts other environmental processes today, including the UN’s climate negotiations.
This is the story of how voting is an ever-present obstacle to the global plastics treaty, what it reveals about political will, and why, despite the process fizzling out, I believe there is still a desire in many quarters to reach an ambitious deal.
Resistance mounts against a vote
Paris, France, May 2024:
When countries gathered to begin textual negotiations on the plastics treaty, a small group soon began to question the rules of procedure. Though hard to detect behind the practised calm of negotiators, a mighty conflict was brewing.
Saudi Arabia, backed by Iran, India, Brazil and China, took the floor. They challenged a standard rule in UN negotiations that allows a decision to be passed by a two-thirds majority when consensus cannot been reached. After hours of plenary statements and rebuttals, Saudi Arabia delivered the clincher. It would “not be moving forward [with negotiations] until the rule is bracketed”.
Words are bracketed in international negotiations to indicate disagreement over their inclusion in the final text. Requesting brackets at this stage was an attempt to kick voting into the long grass.
Negotiators ultimately spent two of their five days wrangling over this point, until – anxiously watching the clock – they effectively agreed to bracket the voting rule. The decision was accompanied by a statement noting the issue still hadn’t been resolved, in case it came up in a future discussion. But that discussion never came, and the voting rule was never applied.
To the treaty novice I was at the time, it wasn’t immediately clear why this mattered. But treaty die-hards saw eerie echoes of what had happened at the start of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process to negotiate curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
Back in 1991, a group of petrochemical-rich countries wrestled the voting rules for UNFCCC negotiations into brackets, where they have now been gathering dust for 35 years. Many people told me this move has been responsible for slow action on climate change today.
Voting is standard in other multilateral environmental agreements. The High Seas Treaty, the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions on dangerous chemicals, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, for example, all allow decisions by a majority vote.
That being said, those UN environmental agreements that allow voting still prefer consensus, reserving voting for decision deadlocks. The desire to avoid a vote pushes countries “to find common ground” instead of overriding a minority, says David Azoulay, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law:
“Knowing a vote is possible is all you need to create the incentive to actually negotiate in good faith. Because nobody wants to find themselves on the losing end of a vote.”
Without that pressure, a country may simply veto a decision it dislikes, potentially due to vested interests. Where environmental issues intersect with economic interests, that is a particular risk.
In the UNFCCC process, “petrostates succeeded in arranging consensus as the rule of procedure” and have thereby stalled progress since 1991. That’s according to Nona Chai, programme coordinator for the Just Transition Alliance, a coalition of environmental justice groups and labour unions.
Last year, Chai attended the COP30 climate conference in Brazil. She says the no-voting norm has made it easier to block key proposals, such as language previously agreed at COP28 on “transitioning away from fossil fuels”. This was opposed by Saudi Arabia and a handful of others, and ultimately removed from COP30’s final text.
Many of the same countries now seem to see plastic as a way to keep extracting the fossil fuels that underpin their economies. Production limits brought on by a global plastics treaty could threaten that. What unfolded during 2023’s Paris plastics talks therefore triggered alarm bells that the same old tactics were being used.
‘Us’ and ‘them’
Busan, South Korea, November 2024:
Journalists jostled into the press room, briefly warming the frigid air of the cavernous conference centre, where the fifth (and supposedly final) plastics treaty meeting was underway. A panel of negotiators were making a rare speech, about a proposal to reduce global plastic production to sustainable levels.
Most country delegates, civil society representatives and scientists in attendance believed production limits were key to a successful treaty. This is in line with the 2022 UN Environment Assembly resolution that created these negotiations. It mandated that the talks should tackle pollution across the entire plastic lifecycle. But over the preceding four meetings, countries had broadly split into factions for and against this issue.
Several factors had stoked the division. At the third meeting in Nairobi in November 2023, a cluster of petrochemical-producing countries formed the “like-minded group”. It pushed for waste management over production cuts. A fourth meeting, in Ottawa in April 2024, featured aggressive pro-plastic ad campaigns and almost 200 petrochemical lobbyists, exposing corporate influence on the process.
By the Busan meeting, the US – a major treaty player – had started rolling back its support for production cuts. (Later, under President Trump, this evolved into an allegiance with oil-rich states, and secret pressure on countries to reject production limits.)
The press briefing in Busan made it clear that the majority was trying to keep a production limit on the negotiating table.
Wearing his trademark straw hat, Panama’s lead negotiator, Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gomez, said countries opposing limits had “not moved a centimetre”. He urged them to negotiate to meet the majority halfway. And with something approaching anger, he had a message for those unwilling to do so: “Please leave it to the rest of us and get out of the way.”
If anyone was looking for a sign that multilateralism was flailing, this atypical “us” and “them” framing was it.
Behind the scenes, the like-minded minority had been suggesting “no text” or “no article” on production reduction, meaning no mention of it. “When we started to talk about the text among those of us who wanted it, they didn’t want to have that conversation,” Dennis Clare, a negotiator for Micronesia, told me at the time. He said they used several tactics to shut it down. “It was an impasse.”
Meanwhile, I watched as these countries kept raising the importance of consensus in plenaries and public statements – despite reportedly not engaging in the normal processes of discussion and compromise needed to reach it.
This tendency has crept into other multilateral spaces. Christiana Figueres, an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, told Carbon Brief that “consensus” has come to be misunderstood as “unanimity”. A decision doesn’t actually need the unreserved agreement of everyone. In difficult decisions of all shades consensus is achieved through flexibility and compromise, delivering a compromise that all parties are satisfied with, if not necessarily ecstatic about.
In Busan, it seemed, the fears expressed 18 months prior in Paris had become real. Without voting, a handful of countries hiding behind the cover of consensus had been emboldened to veto the majority.
Cacophonous collapse
Geneva, Switzerland, August 2025:
It was the final day of the sixth UN plastics treaty meeting, called after the fifth in Busan had failed to reach an agreement. People had been waiting hours for the final text.
Just before midnight, everyone was summoned into the vast plenary hall and an expectant hush fell. But then Luis Vayas Valdievieso, the meeting’s chair, explained the treaty was still not ready. “This plenary is adjourned!”, he boomed, banging his gavel down. Almost 4,000 delegates let out a roar of frustration. At 31 seconds, it was the shortest plenary in UN history. It seemed to symbolise a process in crisis.
The anticipated text was expected to be a significant upgrade on a draft Valdievieso had released the day before, which had provoked widespread outrage and despair. It remains unclear why, but that draft barely resembled what most negotiators wanted. A section on production controls was replaced with pollution measures only, language on regulating harmful plastic chemicals was erased and the agreement was no longer legally binding.
Camila Zepeda, Mexico’s lead negotiator, described that draft to me as “an empty shell.”
The text had been roundly rejected, pushing countries back into negotiations to try and develop another draft. That still wasn’t ready by the midnight plenary on the final day. When Valdievieso gavelled that bafflingly brief plenary to a close, the meeting moved into overtime and he held informal meetings with countries to try and reach some resolution.
Ultimately, they could not agree on a final text. At a final closing plenary just after 5am, Colombia captured the sense of frustration, saying the process had been “consistently blocked by a small number of states who simply don’t want an agreement”. Two months later, Valdievieso resigned as chair.
A vote for the future
How different would things be if voting had been part of this fraught process? Azoulay feels sure it would have at least brought an agreement “very, very much closer”. Voting in multilateral environment agreements, intended as a last resort, has become one of the only available tools to defend multilateralism.
Having watched the process unfold, along with others I feel unsure whether voting could realistically have closed the gaping void between the countries on either side of this issue. In other words, voting is not a substitute for political will
Fernando Tormos-Aponte, policy lead at the Just Transition Alliance, worries that a voting process might just encourage countries that dislike a negotiated outcome to leave the whole process, as the US has done with the Paris climate agreement. “If [the plastics treaty] becomes too ambitious, the US won’t sign it, just like they didn’t sign Kyoto and just like they eventually withdrew from Paris.”
I consulted Alexandra Harrington, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Plastic Pollution Task Force. She sees things slightly differently. Fighting harder for voting at the commencement of the plastics negotiations would have helped, Harrington says, by immediately revealing countries’ true intentions.
A vote demanded by the majority in the early days of the treaty may have pushed the blockers to actually consider whether they could commit and negotiate in good faith, or if they would prefer to exit the negotiations. It also helps avoid a situation where ambition is compromised by a minority that may never even ratify the agreement.
“I think voting brings more honesty to that process,” says Harrington.
Along these lines, some have suggested that those countries that do actually want a treaty – the so-called “coalition of the willing” – could break out of the UN system and begin a new process among themselves.
That idea is not unique to the plastics treaty. Frustrations with the creaking, consensus-focused multilateral system also surfaced at COP30. As it ended, Colombia and the Netherlands launched a separate global conference for nations willing to transition away from fossil fuels.
A new plastics process that at least includes the world’s major plastics consumers could be effective in reducing production and pollution, experts argue. It could shift the markets, even without the world’s biggest plastics and petrochemicals producers on board.
Others say an agreement outside the UN could be effective if it includes China, the world’s biggest plastic producer.
This is how you undermine the multilateral system, by making it uselessDavid Azoulay, Center for International Environmental Law
Some national negotiators I spoke to in Geneva said it is important not to knock multilateralism when it is already down, and therefore to stay within the UN. But Azoulay feels the damage is already done, pointing to the plastic treaty process itself: “This is how you undermine the multilateral system, by making it useless.”
For most nations, an exit may be a step too far for now. “I believe there’s not enough appetite to move outside of the UN system,” says Felix Wertli, Switzerland’s lead negotiator in the plastics treaty process.
An alternative could be for some of the measures of the plastic treaty to be adopted under an existing international agreement, such as the 1989 Basel Convention, Wertli says. That convention includes the possibility to vote.
The plastics treaty process will continue in some form. The next step is for countries to elect a new chair to replace Valdievieso at a one-day meeting scheduled for February. This meeting won’t include formal negotiations but countries can raise procedural issues. Harrington says voting rules could come up.
Formal negotiations are due to resume at some point after that. Voting is still an option. As Harrington points out, it is hibernating in the rules of procedure, ready to be reawakened by a party bold enough to roll the diplomatic dice: “You need one country that is willing to just put its hand up and say, okay, we’re calling for a vote.”
Future momentum
Amid the various twists and turns of the plastics treaty process, one thing seemed clear to me throughout: there is huge momentum to reach a deal. It is embodied by the activists who turned up, year after year and at great expense, to fight for the cause. It is in the mounting science, and the raw emotion of negotiators who wept in the final plenary.
But even as that momentum grows, tonnes of plastic continue to be churned out, advancing one of the planet’s richest and most destructive industries. While many mourn the treaty’s apparent collapse, some are celebrating it.
Ultimately, the world’s majority wants a treaty that begins to reduce the damaging impact of plastic on people and planet. History will judge the treaty by whether it achieves that goal.
