08/01/2025

Could Recycled Content Be a Back Door to Production Caps in Plastics Treaty?

Plastics News | Steve Toloken | July 30, 2025

Could Recycled Content Be a Back Door to Production Caps in Plastics Treaty?

Production caps on virgin resin have been a major stumbling block within discussions for a global plastics treaty, and as the final round of talks opens Aug. 5, it remains hard to predict if they'll be part of any final deal.

But even if caps are not included, the treaty still seems likely to endorse measures like recycled content and reusable packaging mandates that go down a similar path toward reducing virgin plastics production.

One treaty watcher said recycled-content mandates could have a similar impact to production caps, but perhaps with more political support.

"By requiring recycled material, you're essentially saying you can only use so much virgin material," said Rob Kaplan, CEO of Circulate Capital, an industry-funded plastics circularity investment firm in Singapore. "It's effectively a production cap in many ways, but it's done in a market friendly way that I think a lot of stakeholders could get on board with."

During a July webinar to discuss the upcoming talks, Kaplan said government mandates for recycled content in markets where Circulate has invested heavily, like India and Colombia, have been "rocket fuel" to improve plastics recycling.

"When government is saying we want to see a certain percent of packaging using recycled material, it really drives a step change in how fast the systems can evolve," Kaplan said. "We see that almost as a demand cap for virgin."

‘Do a lot' from demand side

Similarly, consumer goods maker SC Johnson has been advocating for the concept of "demand caps" as a tool to limit virgin plastic, including requirements for post-consumer plastic in products.

"Our chairman [Fisk Johnson] has taken a little bit of flack, I would say, for this concept that he introduced called demand caps," said Jeff Bezzo, plastics sustainability leader for SC Johnson, speaking at a July 29 panel discussion on the treaty in Washington. "It really just means exactly that, that we can control the demand side with the right policy tools, things like PCR requirements.

"Refill and reuse is another piece that we would like to see incorporated … [to] naturally reduce demand for virgin materials," said Bezzo, speaking at an event hosted by the Solid Waste Association of North America.

Bezzo said SC Johnson has reduced its use of virgin plastic by 33 percent since 2018, with post-consumer resin playing a "big part" of that, along with lightweighting and package redesign.

"I'm an absolute believer that we can do a lot from the demand side," Bezzo said.

At the previous round of treaty talks, in South Korea in November, Fisk Johnson publicly called for the treaty to include PCR requirements, as he labeled microplastics an emerging pollutant and urged countries to come up with a strong treaty.

At the upcoming round, scheduled to run from Aug. 5-14 at the United Nation's European headquarters in Geneva, SC Johnson said it will push for a treaty that reduces virgin plastic production, promotes global product design standards and supports low-income countries.

The Geneva round is the last scheduled negotiating session but countries could decide to have more.

Pushing for production caps

Even with the talk about recycled-content mandates, many countries are continuing their push for the treaty to include supply-side limits like virgin production caps.

Almost 100 nations, more than half of those in the talks, signed a declaration in June at a U.N. oceans conference calling for the plastics treaty to set global targets to reduce plastics production and consumption to sustainable levels.

They argue that the world can't manage its plastic waste now, and without some targets for sustainable levels of production and consumption, that will get harder in the future.

A diplomat from Panama, Debbra Cisneros, told a July 24 webinar organized by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, that production limits have been among the more difficult parts of the negotiations.

But she said Panama sees them as an effective tool to address plastic pollution and protect the country's fisheries, tourism and coastal communities.

"This is not a future risk for us. It's an everyday challenge and that's why we have remained firm in our support for upstream measures … particularly in the need of reducing the production of PPPs, or primary plastic polymers," Cisneros said.

A treaty, of course, could include both supply-side measures like production caps and demand-side tools like recycled-content mandates, or neither — or even one and not the other.

Both caps and recycled content/reuse targets, in fact, are included in the latest version of the treaty's draft language, a "chair's text" released Dec. 1 at the end of the last round of talks in South Korea.

The language around caps, though, in Article 6 of the draft, is more heavily bracketed in its text, meaning that there's less agreement among nations about specific language on production limits, or even whether to include them at all. Large plastics producing and fossil-fuel extracting nations have pushed back against caps in the treaty.

The language around recycled-content and reuse targets, by contrast, is largely free of brackets, suggesting there's more agreement among countries about its provisions.

Focus on pollution, not production

Plastics industry groups have argued that production caps should be left out of the treaty because they'll raise costs for consumers and have unintended negative environmental impacts if some applications shift to other materials with higher environmental footprints.

Instead, the World Plastics Council and other industry groups are calling for the treaty to include mandatory national or regional recycled content targets that increase over time.

"The focus of the agreement should really be on ending plastics pollution and not on ending plastics production," said Benny Mermans, chair of the WPC and an executive with Chevron Phillips Chemical Co.

Mermans said in a statement that countries should focus on issues in the treaty where there's more agreement.

"I would urge negotiators to focus on what unites us, building waste management capacity and the circular model we all aspire to, and to steer away from contentious issues that threaten the historic opportunity to reach an agreement to end plastic pollution," he said.

Political challenges

But some studies, like one from the University of California at Santa Barbara, have argued that both recycled-content requirements and production caps will be needed.

It said that capping production at 2020 levels, along with a requirement for 40 percent recycled content for plastic products, could play a major role in reducing plastic pollution.

The study also advocated for more spending on waste management, particularly in low-income countries, and putting a small fee on plastics packaging.

"When you're putting the price of things side-by-side, that cheap cost of virgin plastic is deceptive because we're bearing that cost on other ledgers, our environmental ledgers, public health ledgers, even social ledgers," said Douglas McCauley, a UCSB professor and study co-author, speaking on a July 24 Newsweek webinar on the plastics treaty.

One environmental group on the same webinar suggested that politics could make it challenging for the treaty to include strict production caps.

"This has always been a major point of contention, so I am not confident that a cap will end up in the negotiations," said Erin Simon, vice president of plastic waste and business at the World Wildlife Fund.

She said the treaty needs to include policies like extended producer responsibility to strengthen recycling systems and to reduce the need for more raw material. It also needs to include language focusing on products and chemicals that have the highest risk to people and the environment, looking at the entire life cycle of plastics, Simon said.

"I think if we can do those things, we are on a good starting path," she said. "But that is not everything the world needs, to be clear. That's just politically where I think we might end up."

Some diplomats involved in the treaty talks said President Donald Trump's administration came into recent informal discussions in early July that countries held at U.N. Africa headquarters in Kenya, emphasizing that the United States would not support production caps.

"They were reflecting industry concerns around the American Chemistry Council that warned that caps could threaten U.S. manufacturing," said Sivendra Michael, the permanent secretary for environment and climate change for Fiji, speaking on a July 14 treaty webinar organized by Chatham House.

Another diplomat, Safiya Sawney, Grenada's climate ambassador, said the U.S. team was very involved in those informal talks, especially at the technical and negotiator level as countries tried to solve thorny challenges.

She told the webinar she hopes countries come into the upcoming talks with a willingness to compromise and not restate long-held positions that leave the treaty "stuck in the circularity of negotiations that don't take us anywhere."

"We know that going into Geneva there will be some hard compromises," Sawney said. "We're very much coming into the process of Geneva with ambition, but ambition that has been scaled back in the interest of compromise and in the interest of delivering."