Protesters march in Nairobi, Kenya, on November 11, 2023, calling for limits on plastics production.. Han Xu /Xinhua/Getty Images/Grist

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production.

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.”

“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are........

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