Sapporo, Japan–G7 environment and climate ministers pledged to end new plastic pollution in their countries by 2040, they said in a statement released Sunday after talks in northern Japan.
“We are committed to end plastic pollution, with the ambition to reduce additional plastic pollution to zero by 2040,” it said.
Germany, France, Canada, Britain and the EU are already part of a multi-national coalition that made the same pledge last year.
But this is the first time the remaining Group of Seven members — Japan, the United States and Italy — have made the 2040 commitment.
German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke hailed the bloc’s new plastic pollution pledge as an “ambitious goal” at a press conference following the two-day talks in Sapporo.
The phase-out will be achieved by “promoting sustainable consumption and production of plastics, increasing their circularity in the economy, and environmentally sound management of waste”, the statement said.
Plastic waste has doubled globally in 20 years and only nine percent is successfully recycled, according to the OECD group of developed countries.
The United Nations says the volume of plastic entering the oceans will nearly triple by 2040.
After two days of talks in the northern city of Sapporo, the bloc’s climate and environment ministers vowed to “accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels so as to achieve net zero in energy systems by 2050 at the latest… and call on others to join us in taking the same action”.
But they offered no new deadlines beyond last year’s G7 pledge to largely end fossil fuel use in their electricity sectors by 2035.
France’s energy transition minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher said the “phase-out” wording was nonetheless a “strong step forward” ahead of the G20 and COP28 summits.
Britain and France had put forward a new goal of ending “unabated” coal power — which does not take steps to offset emissions — in G7 electricity systems this decade.
But with global energy supplies still squeezed by the war in Ukraine, the target faced pushback from other members, including bloc president Japan and the United States.
“I would obviously have liked to have been able to make a commitment to phase out coal by 2030,” Pannier-Runacher told AFP.
But “it is one issue on which we can still make progress in forthcoming discussions, particularly at COP28”, the UN climate conference to be held in Dubai this November.