Preparatory Materials for the Plastics Treaty INC

In 2022, United Nations Member States adopted a mandate to negotiate an international legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. The mandate sets out a goal for the plastics treaty to be negotiated before the end of 2024.

The negotiations about the treaty’s design, reach, and function began first in an ad hoc Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) in Dakar, Senegal, which focused on developing rules of procedures for the negotiation, and subsequently in the first two Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) meetings — INC-1 and INC-2 — respectively in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in November 2023, and Paris, France, in May 2023.

The third meeting — INC-3 — will take place between November 13 and 17, 2023, in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Center for International Environmental Law has produced a number of materials ahead of the negotiations, including the following:

Treaties, including multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), provide obligations for States to undertake either individual or joint action to implement international legal instruments. Implementation refers to the process by which countries establish national policies that reflect their treaty obligations. This brief clarifies the difference between three common implementation measures: national implementation plans (NIPs), national action plans (NAPs), and nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The brief provides a list of key recommendations to inform the negotiation of a plastics treaty, and concludes that far from being mutually exclusive, NIPs and NAPs should be seen as complementary forms of implementation of the future plastics treaty.

Read the brief.

This document aims to provide delegates with a list of definitions of key terms that could appear in the treaty or come up during its negotiation. We do not make specific recommendations, rather we compile existing definitions. However, we do recommend that the OECD definition of plastic pollution be used as the working definition for the negotiation.

Read the compilation.

There is no need for a dedicated article on scope and principles in the treaty. The scope is already agreed from the UNEA resolution which set up the mandate for the treaty negotiation. This submission clarifies that and gives more details on certain principles that we believe should be operationalized into the treaty.

Read the submission on scope and principles.

CIEL believes that intersessional work on chemicals is essential to the treaty’s negotiation. However, most, if not all, of the resources needed to develop criteria for restrictions of chemicals and polymers has already been published. This submission highlights and summarizes some of the relevant reports on this topic, to inform intersessional work.

Read the submission on intersessional work.