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This week, in a nondescript port city in South Korea, delegates from around the world will gather for the most consequential negotiating session you’ve probably never heard of.
This isn’t the G20, nor a meeting to curb nuclear weapons or address the threats of infectious disease.
Plastic chemicals are making us fatter, sicker and less fertile.Credit: Bloomberg
It isn’t COP29, where I was last week calling for Real Zero – an end to the use of fossil fuels. But it’s just as important.
It is the final round of negotiations for what could be a groundbreaking treaty to end the incessant production of virgin plastic and curb the devastating impact that plastic chemicals are having on human health.
It is now a scientific fact that plastic chemicals are making us fatter, sicker and less fertile.
If the world does nothing, if the negotiators just tinker around the edges, we are locking ourselves into a future where we and our kids get more and more unwell from the plastic chemicals building up in our food, our water and our bodies.
Minderoo Foundation has launched a new ad campaign on the human health impacts of plastic production.Credit: Minderoo Foundation.
Unsurprisingly, some fossil fuel companies and countries are actively lobbying for a weak treaty – because they’re profiting from plastics.
At the most recent round of plastic treaty negotiations in Ottawa, one in 20 of the more than 4000 delegates was a fossil fuel executive, lobbying for your children to continue to be harmed by toxic chemicals.