How (Not) to Make a Plastics Treaty - Bracket-Breaking News (Potentially)

On the way to the final round of negotiations towards the global plastics treaty, things are moving fast. And there's a major development on the road to Busan, something that could change everything. Ambassador Luis Vayas, the chair of the intergovernmental negotiating committee, made a move that could help the treaty text break free from all the brackets to get the process back on track. Magnus Løvold from the Norwegian Academy of International Law just published the details on his blog, Points of Order. And one of his first readers was Rebecca Altman, an environmental sociologist from the US who's currently writing her first book on plastics. We agreed that this is too insightful not to share it with you. So Rebecca went into the studio at Brown University and recorded the audio version of Magnus' blog post for us. This podcast is produced in the spirit of the gift economy. If you enjoy listening please support the production on https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/support/ Find Magnus' written blog post "a basic proposal" here: https://medium.com/points-of-order/a-basic-proposal-ad5e455c3480 Read Rebecca's writing on plastics: https://rebecca-altman.com/home Thanks to Katie Silberman at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society for helping us record the episode - and to Dorian Roy for the music. The studio recording is by Ray Mandel-Mueller, made possible through programming by the Brown Arts Institute. Thanks for the great sound, Ray!