The Global Plastics Treaty: Three Scenarios for Packaging and Recycling

A Live Negotiation, Not a Finished Rulebook

Most environmental treaties covered in a business or policy briefing are either already in force, with known rules an organisation must simply comply with, or still years from any negotiating text at all. The global plastics treaty process sits in a less common middle position: a legally binding instrument is actively being negotiated, substantial common ground already exists, and the final shape of the rules is genuinely still open. That makes it a useful live case study in how international economic and environmental negotiations work, and in how organisations should plan under genuine uncertainty rather than waiting for certainty that has not yet arrived.

This masterclass treats the negotiation as exactly that — a negotiation process, described mechanically and neutrally, not a cause to advocate for on one side or the other. The economic and design implications of each possible outcome are what matters for planning purposes, regardless of which outcome eventually prevails.

What the Process Is

In 2022, United Nations member states agreed to develop a legally binding international instrument on plastic pollution, covering the full lifecycle of plastic — from production through design, use, and end-of-life management. The negotiating body tasked with drafting this instrument is known as the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), and it has convened multiple negotiating sessions since then, each working through successive drafts of treaty text.

The mandate itself — addressing the "full lifecycle" of plastic — is significant, because it is broader than many earlier environmental agreements that focused on a single stage, such as waste management or a specific class of hazardous substance. A full-lifecycle mandate opens the negotiation to questions spanning virgin plastic production volumes, product design standards, chemical additives, waste management infrastructure, and international trade in plastic waste — each of which has different economic actors, different existing regulatory frameworks, and different levels of consensus among negotiating parties.

Why the Rounds Are Hard: Two Positions, Described Factually

The central tension running through the INC negotiating rounds is a genuine, structural disagreement about where the instrument's ambition should be concentrated. Both positions are held by substantial coalitions of negotiating parties and industry stakeholders, and both rest on coherent economic and practical reasoning. Describing them factually, without assigning merit to either:

Position one: production-focused ambition. This position holds that plastic pollution cannot be adequately addressed by managing waste after it is generated, because global plastic production volumes are projected to continue rising substantially in coming decades, and waste management infrastructure — even where well-funded — has historically not kept pace with production growth in many parts of the world. Under this reasoning, an effective instrument needs mechanisms that address the upstream volume of virgin plastic entering the economy, alongside downstream waste management, rather than relying on waste management alone to close the gap.

Position two: waste-management and downstream focus. This position holds that plastic itself is a valuable, versatile material with legitimate uses across packaging, healthcare, construction, and other sectors, and that the more tractable and immediately implementable lever is strengthening waste collection, sorting, and recycling infrastructure, along with extended producer responsibility schemes, rather than constraining production volumes directly. Under this reasoning, production constraints risk affecting legitimate economic activity and material substitution decisions that may not, in every case, have a lower overall environmental footprint than plastic, while infrastructure investment is a more universally actionable and less contentious lever.

Both positions can and do coexist in various combinations across negotiating drafts — an instrument could, mechanically, include both upstream and downstream provisions in different proportions, which is part of why treaty text has continued to evolve across rounds rather than settling early on one framing exclusively. The negotiation also spans a wide range of other contested elements: which chemicals and polymer types warrant specific restriction or phase-out, how "problematic and avoidable" plastic products should be defined and by whom, what financing mechanisms would support implementation in developing economies, and what compliance and reporting mechanisms would accompany any agreed provisions.

It is also worth noting that these two positions are not simply a divide between different categories of country or different industry sectors in a uniform way — coalitions on each side include a mix of negotiating parties with different plastic production profiles, waste-management baselines, and economic structures, and industry stakeholders themselves are not uniformly aligned on one side either, since packaging producers, recycling operators, and virgin polymer producers each have different commercial exposure to the two positions. This complexity is a genuine feature of the negotiation, not a simplification error — it is part of why consensus has taken multiple rounds to approach rather than resolving quickly.

Where Things Stood After the 2024–2025 Rounds

Negotiating sessions through 2024 and into 2025 advanced substantial draft text and narrowed some areas of disagreement, while leaving the central production-versus-downstream tension, along with financing mechanisms and the scope of chemical and polymer restrictions, unresolved. Sessions extended beyond their originally scheduled conclusion as negotiators worked through accumulated bracketed text — the convention by which unresolved treaty language is marked for further negotiation — without reaching final consensus on a complete instrument.

The process has continued into further negotiating sessions extending into late 2026, reflecting both the genuine complexity of a full-lifecycle mandate spanning production, design, and waste management, and the reality that a instrument intended to bind a very large number of national economies with different plastic production profiles, waste infrastructure baselines, and economic development levels requires substantial additional negotiation to reach text that a broad coalition of parties is prepared to adopt. This is a normal feature of complex multilateral environmental negotiations rather than a sign of the process failing — comparable multi-stage negotiations in other domains have similarly required multiple extended rounds before reaching final text.

The Contested Elements, One Level Deeper

Beyond the central production-versus-downstream tension, several specific negotiating elements recur across INC rounds and are worth understanding individually, because each has different mechanical implications for packaging, recycling, and product design regardless of how the treaty's overall ambition level lands.

Problematic and avoidable products. Draft text has repeatedly addressed the question of whether the instrument should identify specific categories of plastic product — certain single-use items, for example — as "problematic and avoidable," subject to restriction, redesign requirement, or phase-out. Negotiating parties differ on how such categories should be defined, who has authority to define and update the list over time, and whether the criteria should be uniform globally or allow national adaptation to local waste-management capacity and economic context.

Chemicals of concern and polymer restrictions. Plastic products often contain chemical additives — plasticisers, flame retardants, colourants, and stabilisers among others — some of which raise environmental or health considerations, and some polymer types are more difficult to recycle economically than others. Negotiating text has explored mechanisms for restricting or phasing out specific chemicals and, in some proposals, specific polymer types, though the scope, list-management process, and transition timelines remain contested.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) harmonisation. Many jurisdictions already operate EPR schemes, under which producers bear some financial or operational responsibility for the end-of-life management of the packaging and products they place on the market. A recurring negotiating question is whether the treaty should set minimum harmonised standards for EPR schemes globally, to reduce the current wide variation in scheme design, funding levels, and covered material categories between jurisdictions.

Financing for developing economies. Because waste-management infrastructure investment needs vary enormously by country, and many economies with rapidly growing plastic consumption have less-developed collection and recycling infrastructure, a significant share of negotiating time has addressed what financing mechanism — a dedicated multilateral fund, integration with existing environmental financing mechanisms, or another structure — would support treaty implementation in those economies, and how such financing would be sourced and governed.

Trade in plastic waste. International trade in plastic waste for recycling or disposal is already governed in part by existing instruments such as amendments to the Basel Convention on hazardous waste movements; the plastics treaty negotiation has considered how its own provisions would interact with, complement, or potentially extend these existing trade-related rules, which is one of the more technically intricate strands of the negotiation given the need for consistency across overlapping international frameworks.

Why This Matters for Planning Now, Not Later

Organisations across packaging, consumer goods, recycling, and materials sectors face a genuine strategic question: how much should current investment and design decisions anticipate a treaty outcome that has not yet been finalised? The honest answer is that the mechanical implications of each plausible scenario are different enough, and directionally clear enough, that planning under uncertainty is both possible and advisable — waiting for full certainty before adjusting design and sourcing strategy risks being caught unprepared by whichever scenario materialises, while overcommitting to one scenario's specific mechanics risks misallocating investment if a different scenario prevails.

This is a familiar planning problem in other domains — carbon pricing trajectories, data-protection regulation, and product-safety standards have all, at different points, presented organisations with a similar shape of decision: a directionally clear trend with an uncertain final rule set and timeline. The organisations that navigate such periods well typically identify the subset of actions that are robust across the plausible outcome range, and prioritise those, while treating outcome-specific investments (built around one scenario's particular mechanics) more cautiously until the negotiation converges further.

Three Scenarios → 2050

🟢 Best path — Ambitious treaty: Negotiations converge on an instrument that includes meaningful provisions addressing both upstream production trajectories and downstream waste management, with binding targets, defined financing mechanisms for developing-economy implementation, and harmonised product design standards (covering recyclability, chemical additive restrictions, and standardised labelling). Mechanically, this would accelerate a shift toward design-for-circularity as a baseline expectation across packaging categories, create stronger and more predictable demand for recycled-content material as harmonised standards reduce cross-border compliance complexity, and push virgin plastic producers toward diversification into recycled-content and chemical-recycling capacity. Recycling markets would benefit from more consistent, cross-border demand signals and reduced fragmentation between national schemes.

🟡 Middle path — Partial treaty: Negotiations conclude with an instrument covering waste management, extended producer responsibility, and some agreed chemical or product restrictions, but without binding production-volume mechanisms, or with production provisions left to national discretion rather than harmonised international commitments. Mechanically, this produces a more fragmented landscape: some jurisdictions adopt stronger domestic production or design measures voluntarily or through separate national policy, while recycling and waste-management investment increases globally but unevenly, tracking each region's existing infrastructure baseline and financing access. Packaging and product design strategy would need to account for a genuinely multi-speed regulatory landscape rather than a single harmonised standard, similar to how some other product-standard domains already operate across different markets.

🔴 Slow path — Continued deadlock: Negotiating rounds continue without reaching a final, ratified instrument, or reach an instrument with largely non-binding or aspirational provisions that individual parties are not required to implement on a defined timeline. Mechanically, this leaves the current patchwork of national and regional regulation — extended producer responsibility schemes, single-use product restrictions, and recycled-content mandates that already exist in various jurisdictions — as the primary driver of packaging and product design decisions, rather than a unified international framework. Recycling markets remain more exposed to commodity-price volatility in virgin plastic (which affects the economic competitiveness of recycled material) without a treaty-level demand floor, and companies operating across multiple markets continue navigating divergent national requirements rather than a single global standard.

What Companies Do Under Uncertainty

Across all three scenarios, several design and sourcing strategies remain sound regardless of which outcome the negotiation ultimately produces — which is exactly why they are the sensible near-term response to genuine treaty uncertainty, rather than waiting for a specific outcome before acting:

• Design for circularity as a baseline, not a contingency. Packaging and product design that already accounts for recyclability, material mono-composition where feasible (mixed-material packaging is harder to recycle economically than single-material packaging), and reduced or eliminated problematic additives, is well-positioned under any of the three scenarios above, because it satisfies the more stringent requirements of an ambitious treaty while also meeting the existing patchwork of national regulation under a slow-path outcome.
• Build recycled-content sourcing relationships now, rather than waiting for mandates. Securing reliable recycled-material supply chains ahead of binding recycled-content requirements — which exist already in some jurisdictions regardless of the international treaty's outcome — reduces exposure to price volatility and supply shortages if and when broader mandates arrive.
• Track the multi-speed regulatory reality, especially for organisations operating across multiple markets. Even in a continued-deadlock scenario internationally, individual jurisdictions continue advancing their own extended producer responsibility and design-standard regulation, meaning compliance planning cannot simply wait for the international process to conclude.
• Engage with standards bodies and industry associations participating in the negotiation process, where organisations have channels to do so, to ensure design and material-science realities inform whichever provisions are eventually adopted — a constructive, technical engagement distinct from advocacy for a particular political outcome.

Regional Note: Gulf Waste and Circular Economy Strategy

Gulf states have been advancing domestic circular-economy and waste-management strategies in parallel with the international treaty process, including waste-diversion targets, recycling infrastructure investment, and extended producer responsibility frameworks under national circular-economy policy programmes. This domestic policy activity is a relevant example of the "act under uncertainty" pattern described above: infrastructure and design standards advancing at the national level ahead of, and independent of, the international instrument's final shape, positioning the region's packaging and recycling sector to adapt to whichever treaty scenario eventually materialises rather than waiting on the international process to set the starting point.

The region's rapid urban growth and associated packaging and consumer-goods demand also make domestic recycling infrastructure investment a directly relevant economic priority independent of the international negotiation's outcome — waste collection and material-recovery infrastructure built now serves domestic circular-economy goals regardless of which treaty scenario eventually prevails, in the same way that clean power investment serves industrial decarbonization goals regardless of any single international framework's final text. This makes the region a useful example of policy that is robust to outcome uncertainty rather than contingent on a specific negotiating result.

Market Structure and Who Is at the Table

The INC negotiating sessions bring together national government delegations as the formal negotiating parties, alongside observer participation from industry associations, waste-management and recycling sector representatives, and technical and scientific bodies who contribute analysis without formal negotiating authority. This structure is standard for multilateral environmental instruments and means the eventual text reflects a genuine negotiation among a very large number of national economic interests and existing domestic regulatory frameworks, rather than a single unified industry or government position — part of why the timeline for full consensus has extended across multiple rounds.

What You Can Do

• If you design or source packaging, prioritise mono-material and reduced-additive designs now — they satisfy the widest range of plausible regulatory outcomes.
• If you manage recycled-material sourcing, build supply relationships ahead of mandates rather than in reaction to them.
• If you operate across multiple markets, track national and regional regulation on its own timeline — it will not wait for the international treaty to conclude.
• Follow the INC negotiating sessions as a live case study in multilateral economic and environmental negotiation, useful for understanding how complex, full-lifecycle international instruments are built.