We are plastic

Ten days of negotiations in Geneva, three years since the start of the talks. And what remains? A treaty text full of diplomatic brackets that mark where countries disagree. Almost 1,500 times: we dare not take a decision here. In the end, what remained was a text in which the core – limiting plastic production – had simply melted away.

This is no coincidence. Plastic is oil in solid form, a second life for fossil fuels. Limiting production would directly cut into the petrochemical industry's revenue model. No wonder countries with large fossil fuel industries, from Saudi Arabia to the US, fiercely opposed it, supported by lobbyists who this time did not just whisper behind the scenes, but took the stage openly. Their refrain was familiar: ‘Recycling is the solution.’

But by now, it sounds terribly false. Less than ten percent of all plastic is actually recycled. The various types are difficult to separate, and much of it therefore ends up in incinerators or landfills, or roaming around – in rivers, oceans, plants, animals, and ultimately in our own bodies. Without firm agreements, global production will grow by seventy percent over the next twenty years. Doctors are now warning that plastic poses a serious and underestimated threat to public health, from reduced fertility to cancer. The plastic soup is not only in the ocean, but also in our blood.

And yet we keep putting off decisions. Just as with climate change – where fossil fuel interests are also undermining the agenda, despite floods, heat waves and forest fires – we refuse to take decisive action. We do what makes plastic so convenient: we go with the flow as long as we can, and once the shape has hardened, we refuse to change. Every policy is packaged in recyclable language: “ambition”, “shared responsibility”, “sustainable future”. It looks nice and shiny, but when you rip it up, it's mostly air.

Plastic is the perfect metaphor for this endless, inconclusive chatter. It looks solid, but it is empty. It looks sustainable, but it is fake. It promises protection, but breaks down into millions of pieces that stick everywhere. Even this attempt at a treaty is not an answer to plastic; it is plastic: fake, lightweight, flexible in form and meaningless at its core.

The most painful thing is that we are allowing this to happen. That we are fooling ourselves into thinking that talking, meeting and another round of brackets will solve anything. We know that there will be losers in a real agreement – in production, in profits, in convenience – and we cannot tolerate that prospect. Or perhaps we are simply not strong enough to break the fossil fuel power. So year after year we allow the current winners to put their interests ahead of the liveability of our future planet.

As long as we want an agreement that glides smoothly and easily through everyone's hands, this is what we will get: conference plastic that looks good from a distance but, on closer inspection, is completely unsuitable for the world.

The conclusion seems clear to me: if we don't get it out of ourselves first, we will never succeed in producing less plastic, let alone removing it from nature.

This column was originally published in Dutch in Vrij Nederland.