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GENEVA: Countries remained at loggerheads Monday over how to tackle plastic pollution, with only four days left to craft a landmark global treaty on reining in the ever-growing scourge.
While plastic has transformed modern life, plastic pollution poses an increasing threat to the environment and the human body — and every day the garbage accumulates on land and in the oceans.
The 184 countries meeting at the United Nations to sculpt a first international accord setting out the way forward return to the negotiating table after a day off Sunday to reflect on their differences.
The first week of talks in Geneva fell behind schedule and failed to produce a clear text, with states still deeply divided at square one: the purpose and scope of the treaty they started negotiating two and a half years ago.
Last week, working groups met on technical topics ranging from the design of plastic to waste management, production, financing for recycling, plastic reuse, and funding waste collection in developing countries.
They also discussed molecules and chemical additives that pose environmental and health risks.


A nebulous cluster of mostly oil-producing states calling themselves the Like-Minded Group want the treaty to focus primarily on waste management.
The United States and India are also close to this club.
At the other end of the spectrum, a growing faction calling themselves the “ambitious” group want radical action written into the treaty, including measures to curb the damage caused by plastic garbage, such as phasing out the most dangerous chemicals.
Plastic pollution is so ubiquitous that microplastics have been found on the highest mountain peaks, in the deepest ocean trench and scattered throughout almost every part of the human body.
The ambitious group wants a clause reining in plastic production, which is set to triple by 2060.
The club brings together the European Union, many African and Latin American countries, Australia, Britain, Switzerland and Canada.
It also includes island micro-nations drowning in plastic trash they did little to produce and have little capacity to deal with.
Palau, speaking for 39 small island developing states (SIDS), said the treaty had to deal with removing the plastic garbage “already choking our oceans.”
“SIDS will not stand by while our future is bartered away in a stalemate,” and “this brinkmanship has a real price: a dying ocean,” the Micronesian archipelago said.


The treaty is set to be settled by universal consensus; but with countries far apart, the lowest-ambition countries are quite comfortable not budging, observers said.
“We risk having a meaningless treaty without any binding global rules like bans and phase-outs. This is unacceptable,” Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastics adviser for the World Wide Fund for Nature, told AFP.
“Expecting any meaningful outcome to this process through consensus is a delusion. With the time remaining, the ambitious governments must come together as a majority to finalize the treaty text and prepare to agree it through a vote.”
Without touching on whether ambitious countries would ultimately abandon consensus and go for a vote, the EU’s environment commissioner Jessika Roswall, due in Geneva on Monday, urged countries to speed up negotiations and not “miss this historic opportunity.”
The draft treaty has ballooned from 22 to 35 pages — with the number of brackets in the text going up near five-fold to almost 1,500 as countries insert a blizzard of conflicting wishes and ideas.
“With four more days to go, we have more square brackets in the text than plastic in the sea. It’s time to get results,” Roswall said.
In total, 70 ministers and around 30 senior government officials are expected in Geneva from Tuesday onwards and could perhaps help break the deadlock.

GILGIT: A massive mudslide early Monday killed seven volunteers as they repaired a drainage channel damaged by flash floods in northern Pakistan, officials said, leaving three others injured.
Rescuers recovered the bodies after the mudslide hit the town of Danyor in Gilgit-Baltistan at dawn and transported the injured to a hospital, said Faizullah Faraq, a regional government spokesperson.
This came a day after a flash flood triggered by a glacial lake outburst damaged the key Karakoram Highway, which passes through Danyor, disrupting traffic and trade between Pakistan and China. Engineers and workers were deployed along with heavy machinery to start repairs, Faraq said Monday.
Meanwhile, several landslides near the damaged mountainous highway left homes damaged in Danyor and nearby areas as first responders evacuated those affected by the floods to safer areas, said Hassan Ali, a local police chief, adding that essential foods were being provided to those displaced.
Sunday’s glacial lake outburst was huge, Ali said, swelling the Hunza river and triggering flash flooding that battered crops. Authorities were still assessing the damage, he said.
The region’s Chief Minister Gulbar Khan called the seven who died “heroes who sacrificed their lives for the community” in a statement Monday.
Gilgit-Baltistan is known for its scenic glaciers that provide 75 percent of the country’s stored water supply, according to the region’s official website. Last month, it was hit by landslides, killing 18 tourists when flash floods swept away their vehicles.
Experts say glacial lake outburst floods occur when water dammed by a glacier is suddenly released, often because ice or debris barriers collapse. Scientists say rising temperatures linked to climate change are accelerating glacier melt in Pakistan’s northern mountains, increasing both the size and number of these lakes.
A study released last week by World Weather Attribution, a network of international scientists, found rainfall from June 24 to July 23 was 10 percent to 15 percent heavier because of global warming. Pakistan produces less than 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, but research shows it suffers disproportionately from extreme weather.
In 2022, its worst monsoon season on record killed more than 1,700 people and caused an estimated $40 billion in damage.
Rains and floods since June 26 have killed more than 300 people across Pakistan.