Lawtitude

From 23 to 29 April 2024, in the grey halls of diplomatic negotiation, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) convened for its fourth round of talks to hammer out what could become the most ambitious multilateral environmental treaty since the Paris Agreement. Their mission? To create a legally binding global instrument to end plastic pollution on land, at sea, and across our bloodstreams.

On the surface, it seems like another chapter in the UN’s long library of environmental diplomacy. But beneath the formalities lies a defining moment in the history of global governance: a chance to regulate not just a pollutant, but a way of life it is a system of consumption, petrochemical dependence, and disposable culture that international law has never truly dared to confront.

Could this treaty be the beginning of the end of plastic pollution or is it just another multilateral shoulder shrug?

Why Now? And Why Another Treaty? It’s a fair question. Don’t we already have a maze of laws about waste and pollution? The Basel Convention governs transboundary waste; MARPOL tackles marine dumping; national bans and regional pacts exist in dozens of forms. But the truth is, none of these frameworks deal with plastic pollution as a lifecycle problem. Most were written for a world that hadn’t yet imagined synthetic polymers wrapping every fruit and shoe and shampoo bottle.

More importantly, they were created in a time before we knew plastic would become what it is today: the most pervasive anthropogenic material on Earth, found in the Mariana Trench, Arctic snow, placentas, and human lungs.

That’s why the INC’s mandate is so groundbreaking. It’s not just about cleaning up waste. It’s about building a global agreement that might actually regulate plastic production at source, restrict certain chemicals, require transparency in supply chains, and hold producers not just consumers legally responsible.

A Treaty 50 Years in the Making
To understand the significance of this moment, one has to look back. The modern environmental movement didn’t begin with climate change; it began with pollution. The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, often regarded as the birth of international environmental law, focused on industrial contamination, deforestation, and toxic waste. But back then, plastic was still a symbol of progress, it was the dream, it was light, sterile, cheap. It was the future.

Fast forward to the 1989 Basel Convention, and the world had just begun to acknowledge the dark side of synthetic abundance: rich nations were shipping hazardous waste to poorer ones, often under the banner of “recycling.” Even then, plastic was the slippery outsider in legal texts, neither clearly hazardous nor innocent enough to ignore.

In this light, the INC process is not just urgent it’s historically overdue. We are witnessing international law catching up to a crisis that began decades ago, wrapped in the soft rustle of convenience.

The Draft Text: Between Bans and Brackets
The Zero Draft, released ahead of INC-4, is a fascinating creature. It contains legal options on everything from product bans and labeling mandates to chemical disclosure requirements and binding national targets. And yet, almost every provision appears in multiple versions legally binding, voluntary, or to be determined. This is the polite fiction of international negotiations: consensus without clarity.

Still, the fact that this treaty is even debating production limits, microplastic bans, and lifecycle regulation is a historic leap. It’s the kind of conversation that was unimaginable in the WTO, unthinkable in most trade pacts, and too politically radioactive for climate treaties.

But where ambition is high, resistance is entrenched. Plastic-producing countries, petrochemical giants, and economic alliances are already hard at work watering down the language. After all, plastic is profitable. For every country seeking a clean ocean, another seeks a growing GDP.

Plastic Colonialism and the Politics of Pollution
Here, the historical parallels grow even sharper. For decades, the Global North exported its plastic waste to the Global South, claiming to promote “recycling” while offloading responsibility. It’s hard not to see this as a new form of environmental colonialism; a structure where convenience in London means carcinogens in Lagos.

As international legal scholars have long pointed out, “universal” treaties often mask unequal impacts. Will this treaty ensure that low-income countries are compensated for decades of toxic legacy waste? Will it allow differentiated responsibilities or fall into the trap of one-size-fits-all obligations?

And who writes the rules? History warns us: the same countries that define the problem often reserve the right to define the solution. In the 20th century, those countries carved up oil fields, shipping lanes, and airspace. In the 21st, they may seek to divide the right to pollute or clean up what they helped create.

If this treaty succeeds, it will join a small family of truly transformative agreements: the Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone-depleting substances; the Paris Agreement, which reframed climate action as a global cooperative mandate; and perhaps now, the Plastics Treaty, which could redefine how we govern materials themselves.

Each of these treaties emerged from a historical reckoning, a realization that unregulated growth comes at too high a cost. That moment has arrived for plastic. The question is not whether the INC can write a treaty. It’s whether the world is ready to treat plastic pollution not just as an environmental nuisance, but as a systemic legal failure- one that must be undone with the same intensity that built it.

Treaties, Trash, and the Test of Our Times
Plastic may be the most democratic pollutant in history. It doesn’t care whether you’re rich or poor, whether you recycle religiously or not at all. It leaks into the lungs of infants in Oslo and into the bellies of fish sold in Mumbai. It is, quite literally, everywhere and therein lies the paradox. Something so small, so light, so easy to throw away has become the heaviest burden our species has created.

For decades, international law has danced around this reality. It has written polite treaties about marine litter and hosted expensive conferences on sustainable consumption, all while the plastic economy ballooned. The INC negotiations mark a potential turning point not just because of their scope, but because they dare to touch the sacred cows of modern commerce: petrochemical interests, consumer culture, and the politics of waste.

If the 20th century was shaped by treaties about war and peace, arms and oil, then the 21st will be shaped by treaties about the planetary commons air, data, climate, and yes, even trash. This treaty, if done right, could be a flagship for a new era of international law. Not one that arrives late to crises, but one that anticipates and prevents them. Not one that politely asks industries to behave, but one that holds them to account.

But let’s not romanticize. This is still international law, where idealism goes to get watered down, bracketed, and slowly negotiated into “frameworks.” The road from draft text to ratified treaty is long, and full of diplomatic landmines: debates over historical responsibility, technology transfer, funding mechanisms, and let’s be honest, who gets to keep using plastic straws a little longer.

Yet, even with all that, there’s something extraordinary in the air. We’ve moved from debating whether plastic pollution matters to how we will end it. That shift, from denial to design is itself historic. Just as the Law of the Sea reshaped how nations saw the ocean, or the Montreal Protocol saved the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons, so too could this treaty become a landmark in how humanity governs its synthetic footprint.

So is this the beginning of the end for plastic pollution? Maybe. But more than that, it’s a test: can the world agree on limits not just to war, but to waste? Can we legislate restraint in a system built on excess? And most importantly, can international law still be a tool not just of aspiration, but of action?

The treaty may be made of words, but its consequences will be measured in oceans, in bloodstreams, in the future lives of children born into a world of fewer wrappers, less microplastic, and maybe, just maybe — more wisdom.