Authors : Noémie Voirin, Earth Action
Most coverage of the global plastics treaty asks what it will ban. For a company placing plastic on several markets, a different question decides the workload: will there be one rule, or a different rule in each country?
The draft that heads of delegation are taking to Bangkok this week leaves that question open, inside a single sentence. The text has moved since Geneva, where the fifth session closed without agreement: it is now a structured draft of thirty one articles. Both readings of that sentence are still on the table, and neither will be settled this week. The instrument is still meant to set global rules, but whether those rules land evenly across markets is still an open question.
What has changed in the draft
Article 4 sets out what a plastic product has to meet before a country can take measures against it. Its first criterion is written in two competing versions, side by side in square brackets, the way a treaty draft marks wording governments haven’t agreed on yet:
“Have a high likelihood of entering the environment and [causing pollution][existing waste management systems do not prevent such likelihood]”
Under the first version, a product is caught if it’s likely to escape into the environment and cause pollution, a property of the product itself. Under the second, it’s caught if it’s likely to escape because the local waste system fails to stop it, which makes it a property of the country instead.
That same bracket carries the question most coverage is actually watching: countries still have to choose between measures that “manage” these products and measures that “reduce or, where possible, phase-out or not allow the production and consumption of” them. None of the draft’s thirty one articles is devoted to production, so that bracket is the only place left where the instrument could limit how much plastic gets made.
Why the second version changes the exposure
Take a single-use sachet, the small sealed pouch used for shampoo or detergent. Under the product-based reading, sachets are either a problem everywhere or nowhere. Under the country-based reading, the same sachet gets caught where household collection doesn’t reach most people, and slips through where it does.
For a company selling in one market, this is academic. For a company selling in forty, it is the difference between one product decision and forty.
The spread of positions is still wide. The Chair’s summary of the last meeting of heads of delegation, held in Nairobi in July, records “views ranging from no article, to establishing global criteria, including through a global list with possible phase-out timeframes … or alternatively, criteria to guide measures at the national level”.
Earth Action has already run a version of this exercise. In a study commissioned by WWF and published in June 2025, EA modelled scenarios for banning or phasing out a set of problematic products, selected on a criterion close to the one now sitting in Article 4: products with a high likelihood of ending up in the environment and potentially harmful impacts on the environment and human health. Applying it meant drawing on mismanaged waste data for 73 countries, covering 92 per cent of global plastic consumption. Every regulated scenario produced net savings against business as usual, up to 8 trillion dollars by 2040.
It will reach companies through rules that already exist
A convention binds States, not companies. Whatever is agreed arrives through national law, and the draft already names the vehicle. Article 7 requires each Party to “establish or promote, within its national jurisdiction, the development of extended producer responsibility approaches, product circularity, or, as appropriate, other economic instruments serving the same purpose”. Article 13 gives each country three years after entry into force to submit a national plan, a deadline still in brackets.
That lands on top of obligations already running rather than beside them. In the European Union the packaging regulation is in force while its targets are not yet binding. Disclosure frameworks already ask for plastic data, as anyone who has worked through the CDP Plastics Module knows. Product level rules are arriving by sector, as they are for microfibres in textiles.
The common input across all of them is the same: volumes, formats and end-of-life outcomes, resolved market by market. A treaty criterion conditioned on national systems doesn’t create that requirement so much as raise the resolution at which the answer has to hold.
The number it turns on, and the state it is in
If the country version survives, applying the criterion means putting a number on how well each country handles its waste. In the Plastic Footprint Network packaging module, part of the harmonised methodology EA convenes, the quantity of plastic reaching the environment is the mass placed on the market, multiplied by the share in each category, multiplied by an index of how much of a country’s waste is mismanaged1, multiplied by a release rate that depends on the size of the item, whether it is rigid or flexible, and on the country’s geography, distance to water and rainfall.
The mismanaged waste index behind that number is a live dataset, not a fixed lookup table. The Packaging Data Hub, which EA develops alongside Systemiq, carries end-of-life data for more than 75 countries, with detailed deep dives for five and more than twenty planned over the next year. The Plastic Overshoot Day 2026 report, which runs on the same data model, recalculates previous years in every new edition as the underlying data improves.
Whichever version survives, applying the criterion will require a country-level number that today comes from modelling rather than measurement, available at useful resolution for only a minority of the states the treaty could bind. That gap is already closing. This is the mission of the Packaging Data Hub, and its expansion is set to support whichever version of Article 4 ends up in force.
The meeting in Bangkok, from 27 to 30 September, is informal, and the only public output will be a Chair’s summary. The formal negotiating session comes later, within the period of 13 to 24 March 2027.
What to plan against
- If the product-based reading wins, a product is treated the same everywhere, so one compliance position covers every market you sell in.
- If the country-based reading wins, the same product can be caught in one market and cleared in another, based on how well that country manages its waste, so budget for a market-by-market compliance position instead of a single global one.
- Either way, build one dataset now: volumes, formats and end-of-life outcomes, by market. It answers this treaty question, and it already answers packaging rules, extended producer responsibility schemes and disclosure requests in force today.
Closing
Earth Action has been measuring where plastic escapes into the environment since 2012, country by country and along supply chains. EA covered the Geneva outcome and the February change of Chair as they happened. For questions about what the country number looks like in a specific market, write to contact@e-a.earth. Detailed country-level data is not openly available, and EA will say plainly what can be shared.