Plastics campaigners warn Australia's pledge at UN needs to be matched with ‘high ambition at home'

The Guardian

13-06-2025

The federal environment minister, Murray Watt, is returning from a UN oceans conference where he pledged to curb the scourge of plastics and make good on Australia's promise to ratify a treaty to protect the high seas.
The five-day meeting in Nice, France finished on Friday, and conservationists celebrated some key steps towards protecting wildlife in international waters.
But on plastics, campaigners warned that Australia's drive for an international treaty needed to be matched with ambition domestically.
In 2022, Australia joined a 'high ambition coalition' to push for a global treaty on plastics, but talks in December failed to produce the treaty.
The treaty aims to cut the production and consumption of virgin plastics, phase out problematic plastics and introduce design rules to minimise environmental harm and make recycling and re-use easier.
Cip Hamilton, the plastics campaign manager at Australian Marine Conservation Society, said attention on the treaty would now focus on talks in Geneva in August, when she would travel with Indigenous rangers from north-east Arnhem Land.
That community in Australia's Northern Territory was being inundated by so-called ghost nets – discarded or lost industrial fishing gear – and other plastics washing up onshore, Hamilton said.
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'There is about 250kg of plastic leaking into our environment every minute. Once it gets into the environment, it's almost impossible to get it out and it's causing devastation to our wildlife,' she said.
'We need to be enacting domestic solutions … Recycling alone won't end plastic pollution.'
Jeff Angel, a leading plastics campaigner and director of the Boomerang Alliance, said Australia's desire for a global plastics treaty 'must also mean high ambition at home'.
Australia had a substantial 'unfinished' agenda dealing with plastics, he said, with recycling and recovery rates stuck at just 12.5%.
'The vast majority of plastic polluting our coasts, waterways, public spaces, soil and air is generated domestically,' Angel said.
While in Nice, Australia joined nine other countries, including France, the UK and Spain, in a new coalition to halt the extinction of sharks and rays.
A federal government spokesperson said this would 'generate momentum for urgent, coordinated conservation efforts'.
Watt told the conference Australia would expand its ocean area protected from fishing, drilling and mining to 30% by 2030.
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The Albanese government also said it would bring in legislation before the end of the year to ratify a landmark global high seas treaty it signed in 2023, and had been two decades in the making.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said enough countries had committed to ratifying the treaty that it could come into force as early as January 2026.
The treaty covers the 60% of the ocean that is beyond the jurisdiction of any individual country – about 90% of the ocean by volume.
Prof Tim Stephens, an international law expert at the University of Sydney, said the treaty would probably be 'very widely ratified' around the world.
'The high seas has remained an ungoverned area,' Stephens said. 'Australia has been an incredibly strong supporter of this treaty process that at several points could have fallen over.
'The high seas is an area where states have freedoms, like navigation, research and fishing, but that also means they haven't been adequately managed and protected.'
The treaty – an agreement under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – would allow for countries to nominate areas of the high seas for protection and would regulate access to marine genetic resources (which, for example, could be used in research or to develop new technologies).
Stephens said the treaty would require signatories, including Australia, to assess any impacts that new activities in domestic waters, such as major fossil fuel projects, could have on the high seas.
This would reinforce that members of the UN convention had obligations to protect the marine environment, he said.
This would mean countries could be held to account under the treaty for protecting the high seas 'in a way we have not seen before', he added.