Kazim AlamWhen Majid Motani was a boy in the early 1960s, his mother would send him to the market with a metal container for oil or milk and a woven basket for groceries. Plastic bags were nowhere to be seen.
“Now, that practice is gone,” says Motani, a Karachi-based fisherman since 1967, tells TRT World.
“Every household now uses plastic bags, sometimes up to 30 in a single day, for everything from groceries to medicines,” he says.
Along Karachi’s 129-kilometre coastline, the consequences of unrestricted plastic use are dire.
Each monsoon season, hundreds of tonnes of plastic waste – shopping bags, bottles, and packaging for chips and biscuits – pour into the Arabian Sea through rainwater drains.
“Our nets get entangled with plastic bags. Fishermen spend all day removing them,” Motani says.
The seabed, blackened by sunken plastics, repels fish, threatening the livelihoods of Karachi’s fishing communities, he says.
“Plastic is probably the number one problem for us,” he adds.
This local crisis mirrors a global one.
Plastic pollution is choking oceans, killing marine life, and destroying livelihoods in fishing communities.
It was against this background that representatives from over 170 countries gathered at the Palais des Nations in Geneva from August 5 to 15 for the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, officially called INC-5.2.
Their goal was to finalise a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty to curb the crisis.
Treaty’s ambitious goals
Initiated by a 2022 UN Environment Assembly resolution, the latest round of talks aimed to address plastic pollution across its lifecycle, from production to disposal.
More than 400 million tonnes of new plastic are produced every year. Without policy intervention, plastic production is expected to go up by 70 percent by 2040.
Only seven countries, led by China and the US, produce two-thirds of the world’s plastic every year.
Yet the negotiations for the binding treaty to curb plastic pollution collapsed, derailed by a sudden 180-degree shift in US policy that apparently prioritised industry interests over global environmental action.
The Global Plastics Treaty was envisioned as a landmark agreement – one like the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer or the Paris Agreement – to tackle a crisis costing the world $1.5 trillion a year.
More than 100 countries, part of the so-called High Ambition Coalition, pushed for bold measures: legally binding targets to reduce plastic production, phase out harmful chemicals, promote recycling, and set up schemes to make producers pay for waste management.
The treaty also sought to support vulnerable communities, like Karachi’s fishermen, through financial mechanisms for a just transition.
Marcus Eriksen, an environmental scientist and a vocal advocate for the treaty, tells TRT World that downstream solutions like recycling fail to address harm at the source.
“Single-use plastics cause damage before they’re ever cleaned up, shredding into microplastics that are impossible to remove,” he says.
Recycling is often uneconomical without massive subsidies – something that makes upstream measures, like production standards and eliminating toxic chemicals, far more effective, he adds.
The US about-turn
The world’s second-largest plastic producer, the US, initially aligned with high-ambition nations like the EU and Japan.
But under President Donald Trump, who took office in January 2025, the US stance shifted dramatically.
At INC-5.2, the US advocated a “low-ambition” approach, prioritising waste management over production cuts.
“The US even said in plenary, ‘This is not a plastics treaty, but a Waste Management Treaty’,” Eriksen says, highlighting Washington’s alignment with the bloc of petrochemical states that favoured a light-touch approach to the subject.
The US made it clear that it does not support global production caps or bans on certain plastic products or chemical additives to them.
This shift in US policy seemed rooted in domestic priorities. Plastics are derived from oil and gas, which makes them a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.
The Trump administration’s February 2025 executive order reversing a Biden-era phase-out of single-use plastics signalled this pivot.
“The US wanted no regulation of those chemicals, regardless of the science documenting harm to people and the planet,” Eriksen says.
The US also wielded economic leverage to scuttle the treaty. Reports said the US issued memos urging countries to reject production cuts, with implied threats of trade repercussions.
Australia, a high-ambition advocate, faced threats of tariffs for pushing stronger commitments. These tactics also swayed other nations, like China and India, to temper their ambitions, bolstering the low-ambition bloc.
Influence-peddling by petrochemical industry?
A heavy presence of industry lobbyists reportedly undermined the Geneva negotiations.
As many as 234 representatives from the oil, petrochemical, and plastics industries attended the huddle. Some of them were even embedded with national delegations.
“Lobbyists outnumbered scientists nearly four to one,” Eriksen says.
“Letting industry dominate the negotiations created tremendous bias,” Eriksen says, while calling for the exclusion of lobbyists from contact groups to reduce their influence.
The UN’s consensus-based decision-making process also exacerbated the stalemate, he says.
“Consensus doomed this treaty to fail from the start.”
With a single country able to veto progress, the process gave disproportionate power to low-ambition states.
The result was an “unacceptable” and “unambitious” draft treaty text that did not include production caps. One delegate called the text the “lowest common denominator”.
When presented, the treaty was rejected, and the talks adjourned abruptly after less than a minute.
The heavy cost of failure
For communities like Karachi’s fishermen, the collapse of talks for a binding treaty on plastic use is a devastating blow.
Motani says plastic waste clogs drains in Karachi year-round, flooding into the sea during monsoons.
“The water along the entire coastline has been ruined,” he says. “The fish swim away.”
What is happening along the Karachi coast is in line with the global trend: plastic pollution is killing marine life, disrupting ecosystems, and threatening food security. Microplastics, laden with toxic chemicals, increasingly find their way into human bodies, causing health issues like cancer.
Eriksen says the treaty should be “taken outside the UN”.
“We have a coalition of the willing that could pass an ambitious treaty and become a powerful trading bloc,” he says, adding that this approach could pressure low-ambition countries to meet higher standards, albeit reluctantly.
For Motani, the stakes are personal.
“I don’t remember plastic bags polluting sea waters in the 1960s,” he says.
“May God drill some sense into the heads of our policymakers. Its use must be cut drastically.”
