Switzerland calls for ‘historic’ agreement against plastic pollution

Switzerland calls for "historic" agreement against plastic pollution Keystone-SDA

Switzerland has called for a “historical” treaty against plastic pollution at the UN Plastics Conference in Geneva. The approximately 170 participating states are to campaign for a binding treaty.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“We want to put an end to plastic pollution. We want to protect human health and the environment. And we want to do this now,” said Katrin Schneeberger, Head of the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), at the start of the ten-day negotiations in Geneva on Tuesday. After three years of negotiations, she called for a “strong signal in favour of multilateralism”.

The Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), Inger Andersen, agreed, but admitted that there was still a lot of work to be done. In particular, some oil-producing countries would have to be persuaded to agree to an agreement on the circular economy of plastics – from production to waste disposal. Without progress, there could be three times as much plastic in circulation by 2060 as there is today.

What is your opinion? Join the debate:

Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].