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Environmental investment groups last year called for ExxonMobil – the world’s largest producer of plastics – to examine how global efforts to cut plastic use will affect its bottom line. Shareholders voted down the proposal, with CEO Darren Woods explaining that the current bans “are location-specific and don’t represent a significant impact on our business”.
A cap on plastic production, as part of an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty that also restricted the use of certain chemicals in production and followed a full lifecycle approach to regulations, would surely have piled pressure on Woods to produce such an analysis.
But there is no treaty. The ‘final’ talks in August ended with competing interest groups and nations almost as far apart as they started. Oil-producing nations, for example, were accused of not budging as they targeted a tame treaty focused on waste management and recycling. Those, such as the UK, who pushed for an ambitious agreement were left licking their wounds.
Joan Marc Simon, founder of Zero Waste Europe, says that consensus can’t deliver progress but the silver lining is that “we have avoided a bad treaty which would do nothing to address plastic pollution” and have “a treaty of the willing almost ready”.
Sceptics may see this as clutching at (plastic) straws, but more than 100 nations back controls on plastic production, improved recycling, a dramatic increase in recycled content and a cut in chemicals.
The chemicals card is an increasingly powerful one. Jane Muncke, founder of the Food Packaging Forum and a key member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, says: “So many people are now aware of the hazardous chemicals in plastics, leaching from packaging into food, and they know plastics are not inert.”
Chemicals are emerging as ‘the issue’ for campaigners and scientists alike – and not just in relation to plastics. Single-use packaging made from paper and card has also attracted attention in relation to the chemicals added to them, either intentionally or unintentionally during the production or recycling process. These too can leak into our food and drinks.
Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami, a report by Deep Science Ventures, warned that chemical toxicity is now as concerning as climate change, with more than 3,600 synthetic chemicals from food contact materials alone found in human bodies. “With toxicity we are still in the 1990s in terms of public awareness and action, but we’re in 2025 in terms of the consequences,” the authors wrote.
When Woods describes, as he has in the past, a significant reduction in plastic demand as “an unrealistic future scenario”, he probably has a point. For now.
Because as the Wall Street Journal writer Saabira Chaudhuri notes in Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, the CEO of ExxonMobil “had, unintentionally, offered up the clearest argument yet as to why a total sea change in policy and approach to the world’s increasingly multi-faceted plastics problems was needed”. And still is.
Fragmented bans aren’t working, global plastic consumption and waste are both forecast to nearly triple by 2060, and it is clear that recycling systems are ill-equipped, overwhelmed and unable to deal with even the existing flood of plastics coming through their doors, Chaudhuri explains.
Three years of treaty talks have taken the wind out of the sails of countries seeking a progressive plastics pact, but expect them to come back fighting.
David Burrows is a freelance writer and researcher
