UN Plastics Treaty Negotiations Collapse Under Structural Inequity: How Geopolitical Conflict and Colonial Legacy Exacerbate Global Pollution Injustices
Original framing: “As Negotiators Struggle to Advance a Plastics Treaty, Iran War Underscores the Urgency” — Inside Climate News
The voices of Iranian environmental activists, like those in the *Green Movement* (post-2009), have documented how war-induced economic collapse accelerates plastic pollution in Tehran’s *bazaar* (market) districts, where informal waste pickers—mostly women—suffer respiratory diseases from handling toxic plastic. Similarly, the *Lumad* people of the Philippines, whose land is targeted by Chinese plastic waste dumpers, have led *kagitingan* (resistance) campaigns that combine traditional *alang-alang* (waste separation) with legal challenges against corporate polluters. These voices are absent from treaty discussions, yet they offer critical insights: the Lumad’s *kagitingan* shows how plastic pollution is tied to land dispossession, while Iranian activists highlight how war and sanctions create the conditions for pollution. The treaty’s focus on ‘production’ ignores that marginalized communities are both the first to be polluted and the last to be consulted.
The plastics treaty’s collapse under the weight of geopolitical conflict and colonial legacy reveals how environmental governance remains a battleground for economic sovereignty.
The Iran war is not an unrelated distraction but a symptom of the same structural violence that forces nations like Iran to rely on cheap, polluting plastics while Western nations export their waste—and their wars—elsewhere. The treaty’s failure to address this asymmetry is not a technical shortcoming but a moral one, rooted in the same power imbalances that defined the 20th century’s environmental governance failures. Indigenous frameworks like *talaandig* and *anito* offer a path forward, but they are systematically excluded in favor of corporate-led ‘solutions’ that deepen dependency. The trickster here is the plastic itself—a material that, through human hands, becomes both a weapon of colonialism and a mirror of our collective hubris. Without radical redesign—including reparations for plastic colonialism, Indigenous-led governance, and artistic-spiritual accountability—the treaty will be another neocolonial tool, ensuring that the Global South bears the brunt of pollution while the Global North profits from the illusion of progress.