Impact statement

This letter calls on the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on plastic pollution to ensure that the rights of Indigenous Peoples, as enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are included in the treaty text and upheld in all future treaty bodies and processes. This includes securing the full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples who are the experts of their own knowledge and science and removing barriers to their participation in these processes, so that Indigenous Peoples can focus on addressing the disproportionate impacts that they and other frontline and fenceline communities are experiencing at all phases of the plastic lifecycle. This letter also highlights that the upstream phases of the plastic lifecycle are highly problematic for Indigenous Peoples who are impacted by fossil fuel extraction, refining and plastic production, and calls on member states at INC-5.2 to ensure that these phases are addressed by the treaty with legally binding and enforceable targets to phase down plastic production, including the extraction and refining of the fossil fuel feedstock for plastic production.

Indigenous Peoples engage in international processes as rightsholders. Yet, despite the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, Indigenous Peoples continue to face many barriers to their participation. In every UN process, Indigenous Peoples must constantly push for their rights to be upheld and for their full and effective participation to be secured. This constant basic struggle for Indigenous rights and participation can consume all the energy and efforts of Indigenous delegates in UN processes, and this at the expense of all the other important knowledge and messages they carry from their communities and nations to address the very real and serious harms that have been inflicted on their territories and all the life within it.

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on plastic pollution has been an especially problematic and challenging process for Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples have been left out of meetings, denied opportunities to make statements or interventions and deprived of basic supports such as meeting room space and funding, all of which prevent their full and effective participation in the process (IIPFP, 2025). As we move into INC-5.2 in Geneva, at this advanced stage in the negotiations, Indigenous rights are completely absent from the current treaty text and Indigenous knowledge is used only in tokenistic ways without any guarantees for protections of Indigenous knowledge and rights, nor for the full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples who are the experts of that knowledge.

The International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Plastics (IIPFP) have outlined key messages that call upon the INC to ensure that the rights of Indigenous Peoples as enshrined in UNDRIP are upheld and mainstreamed in the treaty text, bodies and implementation processes, and that the knowledge and science of Indigenous Peoples are incorporated with protections, and with assurances of the full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples (IIPFP, 2024). The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at their 24th session, also called upon the INC on plastic pollution to “guarantee the meaningful participation of Indigenous Peoples in all negotiations” (UNPFII, 2025). As has been noted by Indigenous Peoples in these and other processes, full and effective participation “will require more than mere inclusion and is not possible without meaningful Indigenous participation in decision-making roles” (Liboiron and Cotter, Reference Liboiron and Cotter2023).

Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately impacted at every stage of the plastic lifecycle, through impacts to their territories, exposure to contaminants, threats to food sovereignty (Bennett et al., Reference Bennett, Alava, Ferguson, Blythe, Morgera, Boyd and Cote2023) and other social, cultural and spiritual harms (Westman and Joly, Reference Westman and Joly2019) that are often not understood or recognized by colonial systems (Hoover et al., Reference Hoover, Cook, Plain, Sanchez, Waghiyi, Miller, Dufault, Sislin and Carpenter2012). Every stage of the plastic lifecycle assumes settler colonial access to Indigenous lands (Liboiron, Reference Liboiron2021, and Peryman et al., Reference Peryman, Cumming, Ngata, Farrelly, Fuller and Borrelle2024) for the direct activities, impacts and externalities of the plastics industry. This includes for extraction and refining of the feedstock, the siting of plastic production, recycling, and incineration facilities, disposal sites, waste shipment destinations and widespread dispersal of macro-, micro- and nano plastics in the natural environment.

The upstream phases of the plastic lifecycle are especially harmful to Indigenous Peoples. Extraction and transportation of the fossil fuels required to make plastic, discharges toxins into sensitive ecosystems, contaminating soil, air, water and foods (UNEP, 2021), and threatens the health and way of life of the Indigenous Peoples who often lose access to their lands for hunting, fishing and other traditional activities. Oil spills by ship, rail or pipeline have devastated entire ecosystems and livelihoods, causing health and cultural impacts to the Indigenous Peoples (O’Rourke and Connelly, Reference O’Rourke and Connolly2003) who have stewarded their lands for countless generations. The disproportionate impacts to Indigenous Peoples from fossil fuel exploitation and spills have been highlighted by Dr. Marcos Orellana, UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights. “This stage in the cycle of plastics causes serious violations of indigenous peoples’ rights to health, culture, water, food, healthy environment, and self-determination, among others” (Orellana, Reference Orellana2021, p. 12).

Oil refineries are often located adjacent to Indigenous and low-income communities that are treated as sacrifice zones by the plastics industry. These communities are exposed to emissions carrying endocrine-disrupting chemicals that affect reproduction, development and other serious health implications (Shadaan and Murphy, Reference Shadaan and Murphy2020). Former Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Baskut Tuncak visited Aamjiwnaang First Nation, an Indigenous community in Canada surrounded by over 60 industrial facilities, including petrochemical processing plants. In his country report, he emphasized the “profoundly unsetting” situation, “environmental injustices” and concluded that “the invisible violence inflicted by toxics is an insidious burden disproportionately borne by indigenous peoples in Canada” (Tuncak, Reference Tuncak2020, p. 8/9). Nevertheless, some states negotiating in the INC on plastic pollution are pushing for the treaty to exclude all the upstream impacts of plastic pollution, which would disregard the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and ignore all the harms that Indigenous Peoples and other frontline and fenceline communities are exposed to from plastic pollution at these stages.

At the downstream side of the plastic lifecycle, people are exposed to plastic and the associated chemical additives through their use of plastic products and the inadvertent ingestion of microplastics and nanoplastics in foods, water, air and other exposure routes (Fayshal, Reference Fayshal2024). Indigenous Peoples have additional exposures from the consumption of traditional foods and medicines and other activities on their territories, lands and waters (Soininen et al., Reference Soininen, Uurasjärvi, Hämäläinen, Huusari, Fedoroff, Moshnikoff, Niiranen, Feodoroff, Mustonen and Koistinen2024 and Bennett et al., Reference Bennett, Alava, Ferguson, Blythe, Morgera, Boyd and Cote2023) and many Indigenous Peoples are impacted by plastic waste colonialism (Peryman et al., Reference Peryman, Cumming, Ngata, Farrelly, Fuller and Borrelle2024).

We are witnessing a slow violence perpetuated by governments and the plastics industry towards Indigenous Peoples and other communities. Slow violence is described as a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Makey et al., Reference Makey2022, p. 3). The ongoing worsening of the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, provides growing evidence that state governance systems are not designed to effectively address on their own, these slow, “out of sight” impacts, which are dispersed across time and across national boundaries. We will continue to see this failure if INC-5.2 results in a weak global plastics treaty that relies only on national measures, without legally binding and enforceable global targets to phase down fossil fuel extraction and plastic production. An assessment of the effectiveness of global agreements noted that “future treaties beyond trade and finance that do not have enforcement mechanisms are unlikely to be worth their considerable effort and may have unintended consequences” (Hoffman et al., Reference Hoffman2022, p. 6). In the case of plastic pollution, a weak treaty without enforcement mechanisms could secure the plastic industry’s continued growth with long-term consequences to the planet for countless generations.

There are no habitats, humans or other species that are exempt from exposure to plastic pollution as it continues to be widely dispersed in the natural environment. We are all sacrifice zones to plastic pollution. Negotiators at INC-5.2 have a great responsibility to address this serious global crisis, while being reminded that Indigenous Peoples, who are on the frontlines of the plastic pollution crisis, must be equal participants as experts of their own knowledge and science, and participate in the process as rightsholders in all decision-making that affects them.