A World Wrapped in Plastic
21/08/2025
Despite growing evidence of harm, negotiations for a plastics treaty collapsed this month. Earth Commissioner Miriam Diamond reflects on what this means for ecosystems, human health, and the fight to curb plastic pollution.
Plastic pollution is a defining environmental crisis of our time. From Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, it can be found just about everywhere, even inside our bodies. That’s why the Earth Commission is working to define a Safe and Just boundary for novel entities, chemical compounds and other substances created by humans that are new to the Earth system, such as plastics, as well as naturally occurring chemicals for which humans have changed their abundance.
In 2022, countries committed to negotiating a legally binding global treaty to curb plastic pollution. Yet despite five rounds of talks and mounting urgency, governments remain divided on the path forward.
In this blog post, Commissioner Miriam Diamond, who co-leads the team of researchers working on novel entities, unpacks the collapse of the most recent negotiations in Geneva and what it reveals about the struggle to rein in plastics at their source.
By Miriam L. Diamond
Plastic pollution resonates strongly with many people. It includes what we all see – plastic litter in our communities, waterways and beaches. Many of us have been moved by photographs of wildlife entangled in plastic or animals that have starved after consuming too much plastic instead of food..
Then there is the plastic that we can’t see – micro- and nanoplastics that are as small as a fraction of the width of a human hair. They are in virtually every human from fetuses to the elderly, and every animal, the air, our food supply and our drinking water. An estimated 19-23 million tonnes of plastic pollution enter waterways annually. The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, which extends from Japan to Western North America, is estimated to contain about 79,000 tonnes of plastic consisting of 1.8 trillion pieces of debris.
Evidence of the harmful effects of “macro” to nano plastics continues to grow, just as the burden of plastics in us continues to grow. The effects on marine species and terrestrial wildlife from large plastic debris include death due to entanglement, smothering and blocking the gastrointestinal tract and also changing habitats. The effects of micro- and nano-plastics on these species range from reduced survival, to lower reproductive rates and poor development. In other words, harmful effects to ecosystems. Similar evidence of harm in humans is now emerging, too, with microplastic exposure linked to organ dysfunction, metabolic disorders, immune system dysfunction and neurological and reproductivity toxicity. At least some of these effects are likely caused by harmful plastic additives, where research already shows causal links to adverse health outcomes.
The promise of a treaty and its unraveling
As plastic piles up and evidence of harm mounts, countries at the 2022 UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) resolved to develop a legally binding treaty to address plastic pollution, with an agreement due by 2024. That deadline has come and gone.
The most recent set of negotiations, held in Geneva this month, was attended by 183 countries. The outcome was a bitter disappointment for many, notably the “high ambition countries” who were pressing for a legally binding agreement that would take a life-cycle approach to reducing plastic pollution by including limits to the amount of primary plastic produced, limits to chemicals of concern used in plastics, and identifying who would be responsible for funding the implementation of the treaty.
These goals were countered by the “like-minded countries” who resisted any language on production caps or chemicals of concern, instead narrowing the treaty’s scope to waste management. This end-of-pipe approach has long been shown to be far less effective than upstream prevention.
A growing tide of plastics
With the collapse of the fifth negotiation session, the path forward for limiting plastic pollution and its myriad harmful effects, is unclear. But what is clear is that more primary plastic is being produced, with an estimated 436.66 million tonnes of plastic traded in 2022. Since the 1950’s, this has resulted in an astonishing growth rate of 8.4% annually, with global demand for plastics poised to double by 2050. The global recycling rate has remained stubbornly at 9% and is not expected to rise because of difficulties with the complexities of plastics that make recycling difficult and costly.
What’s more, oil-producing countries have a clear stake in keeping plastics around. Plastics consume 10–14% of global oil production, and turning oil into plastics and chemical additives is more profitable than simply burning oil as a fuel. As such, the oil-producing countries have come together as the “like-minded countries” to block any reference to the fundamental solution of reducing the millions of tonnes of annual plastic production, of which about 5% ends up in the environment annually, and some percentage ends up in us.
Where do we go from here
Further science is not needed to show the folly of uncontrolled primary plastic production and the use of harmful chemicals in those plastics. The Earth Commission’s work shows that crossing Safe and Just boundaries undermines both human well-being and ecosystem stability. And as the Commission has argued, staying within these boundaries requires transformative change, not incremental and “end-of-pipe” fixes.
Yet the world stands now at an impasse because of the tension between the rights of humanity and the planet to a clean and safe environment, pitted against the right of oil-producing countries to continue their production. There are policy solutions, but they do not include passing a Plastics Treaty focused only on waste management, which evidence shows, will not sufficiently stop the harm. The talks in Geneva may have failed, but the urgency has not diminished.
Miriam L. Diamond is a professor at the University of Toronto and an international expert in chemical contaminants from sources to management. She co-leads the Commission’s working group on novel entities.
