France has joined other nations and environmental groups in slamming this week's failure to agree a landmark treaty on tackling plastic pollution. The UN-sponsored world summit ended Friday with no consensus on a last-ditch proposal aimed at breaking the deadlock.
Negotiators from 185 countries went through the night Thursday in a bid to find common ground between nations, but they failed to come up with a deal.
Some countries wanted bolder action such as curbing plastic production, while oil-producing states wanted any treaty to focus more narrowly on waste management.
French Minister for Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher expressed her "disappointment" and "anger" on Friday at the end of the summit in Geneva.
"A handful of countries, driven by short-term financial interests and not by the health of their populations and the sustainability of their economies, have blocked the adoption of an ambitious treaty against plastic pollution," she said in a statement.
She blamed the lack of progress on a handful of fossil-fuel producing countries, notably Gulf nations, but she also accused the United States of not having been "helpful" in the negotiations.
Pannier-Runacher said lessons would need to be learned so that negotiations could resume.
UN talks on plastic pollution treaty end without a deal
Wake-up call
The reaction from environmental groups such as Greepeace was more scathing, saying that the failure to reach a deal should be a "wake-up call for the world".
Graham Forbes, Greenpeace head of delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty representing the US, said the time for hesitation was over and that the future of the planet was in jeopardy.
"The call from all of civil society is clear: we need a strong, legally binding treaty that cuts plastic production, protects human health, provides robust and equitable financing, and ends the plastic pollution from extraction to disposal," he said.
"And world leaders must listen. The future of our health and planet depends on it."
David Azoulay, representing the Centre for International Environmental Law at the summit, called the lack of consensus "an abject failure", adding that some countries came with the objective to "block any attempt at advancing a viable treaty".
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In his statment, issued on Friday, he said the whole structure of negotiations needed to be overhauled to avoid future pitfalls.
"It’s impossible to find a common ground between those who are interested in protecting the status quo and the majority who are looking for a functional treaty that can be strengthened over time."
Azoulay suggested that countries that wanted a treaty "must now leave this process and form a treaty of the willing" with options for voting.
"The world does not need more plastic. The people know it, doctors know it, scientists know it, and the markets know it. The movement to end plastic pollution goes beyond just the treaty, and it does not end here," he said.
The World Wide Fund for Nature said the talks exposed how consensus decision-making "had now "outplayed its role in international environmental negotiations".
Red lines
Countries voiced anger and despair as the talks unravelled, but said they wanted future negotiations – despite six rounds of UN talks over three years now having failed to find agreement.
Talks chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso said the session had merely been adjourned rather than ended.
He told French news agency AFP that countries and the secretariat "will be working to try to find a date and also a place" for resuming the talks.
The negotiations were hosted by the UN Environment Programme.
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UNEP chief Inger Andersen told AFP that the Geneva talks had fleshed out the deeper details of where countries' red lines were.
"They've exchanged on these red lines amongst one another – that's a very important step," she said.
The plastic pollution problem is so ubiquitous that microplastics have been found on the highest mountain peaks, in the deepest ocean trench and scattered throughout almost every part of the human body.
On current trends, annual production of fossil-fuel-based plastics will nearly triple by 2060 to 1.2 billion tonnes, while waste will exceed one billion tonnes, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
