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Fatigue, and a lot of anger. The failure of negotiations in Geneva in order to adopt a treatise on plastic pollution sounded on Friday morning, while part of the participants had not closed the eye of the night. “We have traveled great distances, and we are tired,” confirmed the Delegate of the Fiji Islands, speaking on behalf of the Pacific Islands, now surrounded by a plastic ocean. But this exhaustion did not come from the distance: “We are tired of having to repeat again and again what it means to be continuously on the front line”, she concluded, by drawing a parallel, like many others, between the question of plastic pollution and the warming of the climate.
The “front line”? These 11 days of negotiations in Geneva, which already represented an extension compared to the initial plan, will have had the merit of clarifying it like never before: on the sprawling question of plastic, the battle is actually playing everywhere.