The East African nation is host of the third Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3) — part of a United Nations negotiating process obligated by treaty to reach a deal on cutting plastics pollution by 2024.
Broad global majorities favor stark limits on plastic production — with three-quarters favoring bans on single-use plastics.
“We must change the way we consume, the way we produce and how we dispose [of] our waste,” President William Ruto of Kenya said on Monday at the meeting.
Representatives in the U.S. have picked up that call. On Monday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) — who hails from a state that is the nation’s No. 2 plastics producer — led a dozen congressional members in calling on Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to sign an “aggressive” treaty.
Evidence from both Ruto’s Kenya and Doggett’s Texas point to the difficulties for jurisdictions attempting local restrictions on plastic waste.
Kenya’s ambitious ban on single-use plastics faltered due to the lack of a global agreement — because smugglers snuck the products in from neighboring Uganda, as NPR reported.
And in Texas, the state legislature overruled a single-use plastics ban in Doggett’s home district of Austin.
In their letter, the U.S. representatives called for a “binding reduction” on the manufacture of plastic, which they said the Biden administration has broad authority to enforce through measures like the Clean Water Act.
But such cuts are the last thing that producers want. The fossil fuel industry is relying on an upsurge of plastics production to make up for market losses to renewables, according to a 2021 report from Beyond Plastics, a project based at Vermont’s Bennington College.
Treaty negotiations should focus on “ending plastic pollution, not plastic production,” Matthew Kastner of the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), a petrochemical trade group, told Reuters.
The ICCA is one of a network of plastics industry trade groups — and a few major fossil fuel-producing countries — advocating for improvements in recycling technologies over bans on plastic.
On Saturday, a network of fossil fuel-producing countries — including China, Iran, Russia and Bahrain — formed the Global Coalition for Plastics Sustainability, according to Reuters.
The new organization will push the treaty negotiators to focus on “waste rather than production controls,” Reuters reported.
Specifically, the plastics industry is urging the massive upscaling of “chemical” or “advanced” recycling — a suite of still largely theoretical practices that plastics promoters say could ultimately allow for the full reuse of all plastic waste.
But a group of public health researchers argued that promoting chemical recycling “would be the worst outcome the Treaty could endorse for managing plastic waste.”
Pointing to the fact that plastics components are both highly toxic and largely unregulated, the scientists — most of whom are with the Plastic Health Council, which focuses on the risks of petrochemicals — also called on negotiators to end subsidies to plastics manufacturers and mandate steep cuts in single-use plastics production.
If their manufacture isn’t curtailed, the amount of single-use plastics in both landfills and the ocean will more than double by 2050, according to a 2017 study in Science.
