In Geneva, the clock is ticking. Countries are halfway through a decisive second week of talks to secure a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty.
But this is more than a treaty negotiation. It is a live test of whether today’s economic and multilateral systems can contain one of the fastest-growing threats to human and environmental health, or yet more proof that institutions built in the age of telegrams and typewriters are simply unfit for a world of cascading crises and collapsing timelines.
For decades, pollution, climate, biodiversity, and human health have been treated as separate files, under separate ministries, handled by separate treaties. The result is a fragmented, patchwork system struggling to confront breakdowns that are now fundamentally intertwined.
Plastic pollution is the case study. Once dismissed as an eyesore of littered beaches and suffocated wildlife, it has metastasised into a global health emergency. Endocrine disruption, fertility loss, microplastics lodged in placentas and lung tissue, plastic is now part of our very biology. The Lancet puts the annual health cost at over $1.5 trillion.
Yet, more than halfway through the talks, the draft text has swollen to nearly 1,500 bracketed sections, formal markers of disagreement, quadruple the number at the week’s start. Instead of closing gaps, negotiators are prising them wider.
Upstream, petrochemicals are devouring the oil market. Plastics accounted for 75 percent of global oil demand growth last year and are expected to dominate the sector’s future. That explains the ferocity of lobbying, and why oil-aligned states are fighting so hard to erase any limits on virgin plastic production.
Each day, humanity produces an astonishing 1.1 million metric tons of plastic, roughly three tonnes for every child born that day. Tomorrow, we will do it all again. Without a cap, production is projected to nearly triple by 2060.
Yes, plastic has essential uses. But for most applications, better options already exist. UN analysis shows we could cut plastic pollution by 80 percent by 2040 with solutions already in hand if governments set clear rules and markets follow. The real shortage is not alternatives, it is alignment: policy, finance, and business pulling in the same direction.
But in Geneva, one group dominates. Fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists outnumber the combined delegations of all EU member states. A few corporations hold more seats at the table than the 450 million citizens those delegates represent. And oil-producing nations know how to work the system, exploiting consensus rules that let a tiny handful of vested interests veto protections for billions.
This is not multilateralism in action. It is a broken system, with procedure weaponised to prevent progress.
If the international system can’t deliver a meaningful agreement on something this urgent, this visible, and this overwhelmingly supported, something that is poisoning our air, food, and water, and infiltrating the lungs, blood, and developing brains of our children, then we have to ask: what, exactly, is it for?
But history is clear. When political will falters at the top, momentum rises from below. From scientists. From cities. From young people. From communities most affected. And yes, from business. Ahead of the Paris Agreement, business leaders helped shift the political centre of gravity. That momentum is needed again now.
Some leading businesses are calling for caps on virgin plastic production, extended producer responsibility, and harmonised global standards. They understand what others must now accept: strong rules do not threaten markets, they secure them.
Others must follow. Not just because it’s good business, but because it’s right. Because leadership in this moment means taking full responsibility, serving all stakeholders, and choosing the future over the fleeting pursuit of short-term self-interest. At the most basic level, if your success rests on the poisoning of millions, surely it cannot be success worth having.
In the coming hours, around 70 ministers will arrive in Geneva. They must do what negotiators have not: break the deadlock, strip away the procedural blockages, and commit to an ambitious treaty that cuts production at the source, redesigns products for circularity, and protects human and ecological health.
This treaty is about much more than plastic. It offers a once in a generation chance to reset global standards and safeguard human and ecological health. If we fail now, we might not get another.
It will not dominate the news cycle but, in hindsight, this week may be remembered as the moment the future tilted one way or the other. The outcome will shape the quality of the air we breathe, the safety of the food we eat, and the health of the ecosystems we depend on, for billions alive today, and for generations yet to come.
For millennia, every generation has been custodian of a trust: to pass on a planet no poorer in life, beauty, or possibility than the one it inherited. It is the oldest covenant in human history, older than nations, older than writing. Will we be the first to break it? The first to knowingly hand our children a diminished world, stripped of its abundance, poisoned at its source?
Success will not happen by accident. It will happen only if people across business, civil society, and the public choose to act, to refuse the comfortable drift toward failure, and to demand more from those in power.
So, step up. Speak out. Sign on. We are not just negotiating a treaty, we are negotiating our own legacy and the birthright of every generation yet to come.
Paul Polman
