Fourth UN plastics meeting wraps with a plan

As the gavel came down at 3:18 a.m. at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) meeting to create a global treaty to end plastic pollution , the room breathed an exhausted sigh of relief. For the first time, the negotiating committee had agreed on a plan for work to be done before the next meeting on the treaty, scheduled for a scant 7 months from now. Along with over 2,500 participants from 170 countries, a sense of urgency filled the halls at the Shaw Center, in Ottawa, Ontario, for the fourth intergovernmental negotiating committee meeting (INC-4) the last week of April. The next meeting, INC-5, is also the final one, since the 2022 mandate is that negotiations on the treaty be done by the end of 2024. Early in the week, participants poured in past a 6 m tall sculpture of a faucet spewing discarded plastic and images splashed across