Global brands push for plastics treaty with ‘fewer polymers, fewer additives'

As the plastics treaty talks begin to get down to specifics, a coalition of consumer brands — among them some of the world's biggest buyers of packaging — is out with detailed changes they hope the treaty brings to their plastics supply chains.

At a basic level, the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which includes companies like Coca-Cola, Unilever and Walmart, wants the agreement to push new standards and laws that could simplify their packaging and plastics supply chains.

The coalition also sees it as building momentum for reducing virgin fossil fuel-based plastic, making detailed recommendations for phasing out problematic materials and chemicals, and setting global targets for recycling systems.

It recently released a 23-page report and held public webinars ahead of the next round of treaty talks, which start Nov. 13 at United Nations offices in Kenya.

There, countries for the first time will start to fill in the initial draft version of the treaty, called a "zero draft" in diplomatic lingo. U.N. officials released the framework of the treaty in September.

Much still remains unclear on the treaty's final provisions. The business coalition wants diplomats to build on the draft language and drive much more detailed global standards around plastics use.

"On a very simplistic level, to me, it's about fewer polymers, fewer additives, fewer layers, fewer colors," said Ben Jordan, senior director of environmental policy at Coca-Cola Co.

Rebecca Marmot, chief sustainability officer at Unilever plc, said global businesses want the treaty to harmonize rules and laws around plastics and packaging globally and build stronger waste management systems to keep plastics out of the environment.

"The first [goal] is our overarching aim to reduce plastic pollution," she said on the webinar. "First and foremost, that means a specific focus on virgin fossil-based plastic."

She said the treaty should include mandatory product design requirements that all plastics can be safely recycled as well as binding targets to scale waste and recycling infrastructure and programs to finance recycling such as extended producer responsibility, she said.

The coalition's report outlines six specific areas where it offers suggestions for improving the treaty draft: chemicals and polymers of concern; problematic plastics; reusable and refillable packaging; product design; extended producer responsibility; and general waste management, including provisions for informal workers in recycling.

The draft generally presents several options around key areas and does not make explicit recommendations, leaving that to future talks.

That cautious approach reflects the sharp disagreements that surfaced between different blocs at the last round of talks, which were held in Paris in late May and early June. That round concluded with an agreement to draw up draft language, but it left many provisions unresolved.

One sticking point was whether to place limits on virgin resin production. Unresolved differences also included how prescriptive or flexible the treaty should be. U.S. diplomats have said they want to bridge gaps between countries, but some members of Congress are urging the Biden administration to take a stronger stance.

After the Kenya round, negotiators plan two more sessions over the next year, in Canada and South Korea, to try to reach a final agreement.

Any treaty or agreement likely could not force countries to make specific changes, but business coalition representatives want to include detailed guidelines to steer national governments, including in technical annexes. For example, they want the technical elements to include initial lists of chemicals of concern to phase out within plastics and to phase down what are being called "problematic" plastics with target dates, which could later be modified.

They call it a "start and strengthen" approach for the treaty.

They say the treaty could include, for instance, limits on multimaterial packaging that's hard to recycle in favor of monomaterial packaging, as well as limits on colored plastics that limit the value of recycled material waste streams, in favor of clear plastic, said Clemence Schmid, general manager of Loop Global, a unit of TerraCycle.

Jordan noted that Coke phased out green-tinted PET in Sprite bottles in favor of clear PET because it produces cleaner and more valuable streams of recycled materials.

While it was not mentioned in this report, coalition companies have worked on other projects, like various national plastics pacts, that have developed problematic lists that include PVC and expanded polystyrene packaging, plastic cutlery, difficult-to-recycle labels, carbon black pigments and intentionally added PFAS substances.

The group that started the plastics pacts globally, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, plays a key role administering the business coalition, serving as a co-lead of its secretariat.

Reusable packaging is another area that Schmid, Jordan and other business coalition companies emphasized. They called for a technical annex to set reuse targets and provide criteria to make sure reusable packaging has environmental benefits compared with single use. They also want to encourage policies that would help reusable packaging scale up to match single-use materials.

"What reuse really needs to be able to compete vs. single-use is on the economic equation," Schmid said.

Coalition members said the treaty could set definitions of recyclability, including detailing recycling rates or levels of recyclability that products must meet to be considered recyclable "in practice and at scale."

This report did not say what that definition might be, but the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a coalition member, has a general definition of a 30 percent recycling rate for a package in an area covering 400 million people to be officially labeled recyclable at scale. But with that definition, only PET and high density polyethylene bottles would be close to qualifying in the United States.

The large brand owner companies in the coalition view the zero draft as a first step to build global guidelines, which they see as easier to meet than a patchwork of national regulations.

"[The treaty] gives us a shot at addressing such issues as eliminating problematic plastics," said Rob Cameron, global head of public affairs for Nestlé SA. "It gives us a shot at scaling up on reuse and refill because we've got a more consistent approach. It gives us enhancements, potentially, on what we call mandatory extended producer responsibility … and it gives us a chance to align new products with common design rules."

He also said, in describing the top three priorities for the coalition in the treaty, that the first is to "reduce the volume of plastics being produced. We have to turn off the tap."

Some of the large plastics groups have not responded to the zero draft in the kind of detail the coalition has.

A statement from a coalition of global plastics trade associations said the draft had an "absence of options" for making plastics more circular. Some observers said it appeared to sidestep controversial questions on how to regulate chemical recycling.

Plastics groups have proposed their own six-point plan for the treaty talks, calling for the treaty to have national implementation plans around things like recycled-content targets and containment plans for high-leakage products.

In general, plastics groups have advocated for more national flexibility in any treaty.

No matter the outcome of the Kenya round of talks, it's not seen as the final decision point for many of the differences. Instead, observers point toward additional technical work that would be needed ahead of the planned fourth round in Canada in April.

A group of about 60 governments that is generally aligned with the business coalition, the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, released a statement on Nov. 3 that called for the Kenya meeting to produce an updated draft of the treaty, what they call a first draft.

Coalition representatives want to build public support for governments that share their vision and pointed to global agreements like the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals as a pact that had strong business support.

"It's a fantastic opportunity to highlight to governments that actually there's a strong alignment between [nongovernmental organizations] and progressive businesses out there who do want to see this strong, legally binding and ambitious treaty," said John Duncan, the co-lead of the business coalition's secretariat and global initiative lead for WWF's No Plastics in Nature program.Global brands push for plastics treaty with 'fewer polymers, fewer additives'