"Plastics treaty negotiations made achieving an inclusive just transition impossible – Groups", 15 August 2025

As the INC-5.2 Global Plastics Treaty negotiations came to an end in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday, August 15, 2025, affected groups aligned for justice have expressed strong disapproval of the treaty process and the state of the chair’s proposal text.

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Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, trade union workers, youth, and fenceline communities are drawing the line and are amplifying a shared message: The negotiations in Geneva made achieving an inclusive just transition impossible, by design.

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Aakaluk Adrienne Blatchford, an Inupiaq mother and land defender, testified to the embodied violence of erasures and exclusions at INC-5.2. Representing the Indigenous Environmental Network, she insisted, “A treaty about us, without us, is erasing history. Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, People of Color, marginalised fenceline and frontline communities are here. Our bodies are born on the line. We will hold the line because we are the line.”

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The Just Transition Alliance critiqued negotiations taking place behind closed doors at INC-5, the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in November 2024. Unacceptably, this violation of environmental justice principles continued at INC-5.2.

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Just transition depends on transparency and accountability to those most harmed by exploitative systems, not a consensus motivated by watered-down ambition that seeks to evaporate the collective strength and knowledges of Indigenous Peoples, frontline workers and waste pickers, and fenceline communities.

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The indispensable Just Transition section (now Article 9) of the treaty text is far too weak. Crucially, this article remains voluntary and repeatedly uses the language of “as appropriate” and “should,” rather than “shall.”

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As Soledad Mella Vidal, a Mapuche woman with the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, stated, “Over 40 million waste pickers are counting on member states to ensure a legally binding commitment to a just transition where no one is left behind.”

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Beard, a retired petrochemical worker, articulates the way forward for an inclusive just transition: “Just transition has to be for all workers. Their lives have to have health. They have to have worth. We have to see that in all the people who work in that chain, not just the waste pickers but also those in the petrochemical sector who work from plastics from the well head to the end user.”

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Focusing on decent work for workers across the full impact-cycle of plastics requires simultaneously focusing on fenceline communities and Indigenous Peoples, centering their experiences, needs, and demands.