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The delegation that will attend the negotiations includes Maria Ivanova, Aron Stubbins and six students from the university.
Northeastern University professor Maria Ivanova is in Busan, South Korea, with hopes of seeing an international treaty that aims to put the brakes on plastic pollution across the globe.
Ivanova, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern, is leading a delegation that is taking part in the fifth round of negotiations on an international treaty on plastic pollution authorized by the United Nations in March 2022.
The delegation includes Aron Stubbins, a Northeastern professor of marine and environmental sciences, chemistry and chemical biology and civil and environmental engineering, and six students from the university.
They include Ph.D. students Nicole Vandale, Olga Skaredina and Clara Copp-LaRocque; master’s students Alexandra Carlotto and Marcello Fisher, also a legislative aide for U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida; and an undergraduate student Kylee Hendrie.
This is expected to be the final meeting of the negotiating committee, which represents more than 190 countries.
“We will see in the current geopolitical space where this plastic treaty negotiation ends up,” Ivanova says.
Currently, a “high-ambition” coalition led by Rwanda and Norway is advocating for a treaty that addresses the entire lifecycle of plastics, she says, from production to consumption to disposal.
“The more we produce, the more pollution there will be,” Ivanova says. “So we have to balance out our production with our consumption, and then innovate in the ways of disposal.”
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Oil-producing countries such as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia have pushed to leave production untouched and focus the treaty solely on managing waste.
In light of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election, Ivanova is now uncertain whether the U.S. position on the plastic pollution treaty might change.
Ivanova points to the Trump administration’s previous withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, a global climate change accord, as a cautionary tale. She fears the new administration might ignore or even dismantle the plastic pollution treaty.
Despite the uncertainty, Ivanova views Northeastern’s involvement as an honor. The university’s delegation will provide necessary advice and assistance during the negotiations, she says.
Northeastern is one of a handful of universities accredited by the United Nations Environment Assembly, a U.N. decision-making body on environmental issues.
According to Ivanova, the world produced over 460 million tons of plastic in 2022 — more than the weight of all humans combined. Single-use plastic products make up one-third of that.
“It persists for centuries,” Ivanova says. “We use it to eat from, to eat with, to drink from, and that goes into our system and it pollutes us. It has negative health impacts, as more and more studies are showing.”
While giving a TED talk at the 2024 Planet Action Summit in Boston on Nov.16, Ivanova introduced the audience to a solution that, in her opinion, can build on the progress already made.
“Responsibility has been so individualized, especially in the West, in capitalistic society,” she says.
Individuals are given a choice to “reduce, reuse, recycle” or buy from environmentally-friendly brands, Ivanova says. But only 9% of plastic is actually recycled.
Individual actions are insufficient to tackle a crisis of this scale, she says. Neither are some regulations on single-use plastics introduced by more than 100 countries.
“We need collective action,” she says, and doesn’t have to start with the U.S. government. For example, cities and towns can improve their own policies and practices.
“We don’t need federal policies to be able to make our own decisions,” she says.
Ivanova also believes advertising and marketing can make a difference. She draws parallels with the anti-smoking campaigns that changed society’s perception of smoking from “glamorous” and “sophisticated” to “not cool.”
“It’s the advertising and how we’re being socialized into what is good for us or what is bad for us,” she says. “We could use the same type of framing to discourage people from using single-use water bottles and other harmful, unnecessary plastics.”