Youth Plastic Action Network (YPAN)

Reflections on the Chair's Guiding Questions for the Informal In-Person Heads of Delegation Meeting - 29 June 2026

The Youth Plastic Action Network (YPAN) is a youth-led network supporting sustained, meaningful, and inclusive youth engagement in the negotiations toward an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution under the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) process. Launched during INC-5.2 in August 2025, YPAN brings together young people from more than 170 countries and operates as an affiliated network of the Children and Youth Major Group (CYMG) to UNEP, which provides its administrative support. The positions below are drawn from YPAN's structured consultations, our submission to the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee questionnaire on plastic pollution and human rights^[1], and our published youth priorities for INC-5.2^[2]. They are offered in the spirit of the four clusters, as solutions-oriented and forward-looking contributions intended to support the development of the informal reference document.

YPAN’s textual suggestions can be found here in preparation for the informal reference document.

Cross-Cutting Reflections

Before turning to the individual clusters, YPAN highlights several cross-cutting points that apply across all four clusters and that we encourage Members to raise during general discussions.

• The full lifecycle must be preserved, with binding upstream reduction as the priority. Consistent with UNEA Resolution 5/14^[3], the instrument should address the entire lifecycle from extraction onward, including legacy pollution. The reduction of primary plastic polymer production through binding global targets, alongside the phase-out of fossil fuel and polymer subsidies, is central. Downstream and waste-only framings cannot deliver the mandate, given that only 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled in practice.^[4]
• Omission is not an agreement. Excluding a topic from the guiding questions does not signal consensus to remove it. Production, chemicals of concern, and microplastics in particular warrant continued substantive treatment.
• Human rights and intergenerational equity belong in the operative text, not only the Preamble. The right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (HRC Resolution 48/13^[5]; UNGA Resolution 76/300^[6]), the rights to health, food, and water, and the principle of intergenerational equity should be embedded across substantive provisions so they actively shape obligations, protect livelihoods, and ensure equitable transitions, rather than remaining declaratory.
• Biodiversity and ecosystem health require nature-positive approaches. The instrument should recognize the irreversible impacts of plastic pollution on biodiversity and mandate nature-positive approaches that protect ecosystem services, food systems, and planetary health, consistent with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework^[7] and the intended scope of this treaty (“including in the marine environment”).
• Global South equity is central, not peripheral. The heaviest and most systematic burdens of plastic pollution fall on the Global South and on marginalized and low-income communities, including informal waste workers, frontline communities, children, and youth. Waste colonialism and the cross-border waste trade shift harm onto those least responsible.
• Meaningful participation and observer access are conditions of legitimacy. Inclusive, rights-based participation of youth, rights-holders, Indigenous Peoples, and informal workers, together with transparent observer access to the second Heads of Delegation meeting in Bangkok in September 2026 and future sessions, and clear conflict-of-interest safeguards, is essential to a credible outcome.
• Effective decision-making must allow the instrument to act. Consensus should remain the preferred approach, but voting procedures are necessary when consensus is exhausted, so that the instrument can function, evolve, and avoid lowest-common-denominator outcomes.

Cluster A

National plans; reporting; implementation and compliance; information exchange; effectiveness evaluation

1. What minimum common essential elements should be included in National Action Plans to ensure comparability while preserving national flexibility?

• National Plans should implement internationally agreed obligations, not substitute for them. Core measures such as the phase-out of problematic and avoidable plastics and chemicals of concern should be set through binding international obligations, with National Plans providing a transparent framework for demonstrating progress, including timelines, milestones, and indicators.
• A rights-based baseline should be a common element. Plans should assess impacts on affected communities and rights-holders, including informal waste workers, frontline communities, children, and youth, so that implementation is grounded in who bears the harm.
• Recognition and protection of informal waste workers should be required. In many contexts informal workers manage the majority of plastic waste without legal status or protection; in Nairobi an estimated 80% of waste management is carried out by informal workers.^[8] Plans should set out their legal recognition, safe working conditions, and inclusion.
• Implementation gaps, financing needs, and capacity needs should be identified explicitly. Plans should map the technical, scientific, capacity-building, and financial support required, tied directly to the financial mechanism, so support follows identified needs.
• Plans must be developed through inclusive processes. Preparation should involve meaningful participation of relevant stakeholders and rights-holders, including children and youth, Indigenous Peoples, civil society, local authorities, and waste pickers.

2. How can National Action Plans be structured so that reporting, implementation and compliance, information exchange, and effectiveness evaluation reinforce each other, rather than operating as separate obligations?

• National Plans should sit within a single, common implementation cycle. Planning, implementation, reporting, review, and updating should form a continuous process rather than separate obligations, with each measure linked to indicators and data sources.
• Monitoring should capture human health and human rights outcomes. Integrating health and rights data, including impacts on vulnerable groups, ensures that compliance and effectiveness are assessed against real-world harm and not only procedural steps.
• Support should be linked to what reporting reveals. Reporting and review should surface implementation gaps and capacity needs that then trigger targeted financial and technical support, closing the loop between information and action.
• The cycle should enable the instrument to strengthen over time. Findings should inform updated National Plans and future COP decisions, allowing the instrument to evolve in response to new evidence and emerging needs.

3. What practical mechanisms would ensure that information exchange contributes to improved implementation at the national level?

• Information exchange must include affected communities, not only States. The right to information underpins every other plastic-related right. Mechanisms should ensure that workers, communities, and rights-holders can access information on chemical content, exposure pathways, and disposal hazards in local languages and accessible formats.
• Community-generated data should be recognized as a tool for accountability. Youth-led citizen science, such as the mapping of plastic hotspots in drainage channels in Kampala, turns community evidence into a means of holding local authorities to account and should be supported within information systems.
• Common systems should include harmonized disclosure of chemical composition. Shared registers and databases covering production, consumption, and chemicals of concern reduce duplication and support cooperation, consistent with the right-to-know principle.
• Transparency should be the default. Information relevant to the protection of human health and the environment should not be treated as confidential; confidentiality provisions should be narrowly defined, consistent with the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions.

4. How can reporting requirements be designed to directly support compliance assessment and effectiveness evaluation rather than functioning as a standalone exercise?

• Reporting should be built around agreed obligations and measures. Requirements should link directly to internationally agreed measures, generating information usable for compliance and effectiveness evaluation rather than serving as a procedural end in itself.
• Reporting should capture socio-economic and human rights impacts. A clear methodology to account for the socio-economic and environmental impact of plastic pollution, including disaggregated data on vulnerable groups, would let decisions be made with full visibility of the rights, livelihoods, and ecosystems affected.
• Common formats and indicators support comparability. Harmonized methodologies allow information to be aggregated and assessed consistently across Parties while reducing reporting burdens.
• Reporting should feed decision-making. Information should be compiled and fed into the COP so that it contributes to strengthening implementation over time, with decision-making procedures that provide voting options when consensus has been exhausted.

5. What characteristics should effectiveness evaluation have in order to be a useful tool for improving the implementation of the instrument?

• It should measure environmental, human health, and human rights outcomes. Effectiveness should be assessed against whether agreed measures deliver real improvements for people and ecosystems, including for the communities most exposed, rather than activity alone.
• It should rest on independent science and Indigenous, traditional, and local knowledge. Evaluation should draw on a robust, comparable evidence base and a strong science-policy interface that integrates Indigenous knowledge systems, with clear conflict-of-interest safeguards.
• It should apply an intergenerational lens and a no-backsliding logic. Evaluation should ask whether measures protect present and future generations, and each cycle should feed a ratchet that prevents regression.
• It should inform future action. Findings should translate into strengthened implementation and, where gaps are identified, additional international measures, supported by COP procedures that allow decisions when consensus is exhausted.

Cluster B

Releases and leakages; existing and legacy plastic pollution; plastic waste management; plastic products design; plastic products

1. How can provisions on releases, leakages, and waste management systems be reinforced by provisions on product design and products?

• Releases and leakages must be addressed across the full lifecycle, including chemicals of concern. Releases occur at every stage from production to end of life. More than 16,000 chemicals^[9] are associated with plastics, including endocrine disruptors, PFAS, and heavy metals. Without addressing chemicals of concern upstream, midstream, and downstream interventions will remain limited.
• Product design should reduce pollution at source. Design requirements should minimize and aim to eliminate intentionally added microplastics, reduce chemicals of concern, and improve durability, reusability, and recyclability, so that fewer plastics become pollution in the first place.
• Waste management cannot scale indefinitely. Even improved systems have limits. Effectiveness requires aligning production and consumption levels with what can be safely managed, which is why upstream reduction and the phase-out of problematic and avoidable plastics are necessary complements to waste provisions.
• These provisions form one integrated framework. Product design, products, releases and leakages, and waste management should be designed as mutually reinforcing, guided by the waste hierarchy as a core principle.

2. What type of provisions should be considered to identify plastic products that may lead to plastic pollution? To what extent can the instrument create a common approach to this, while respecting different national circumstances and prerogatives?

• The instrument should phase out problematic, avoidable, and unnecessary plastics (PAUPs). Provisions should identify products that are inherently problematic or avoidable due to toxicity, leakage potential, single-use design, or lack of essentiality.
• A common approach requires both global criteria and internationally agreed lists. Criteria alone, applied through voluntary national approaches, risk fragmentation and market distortion. Agreed lists with phase-out timelines reduce divergence while preserving flexibility on the how.
• Flexibility should attach to implementation, not to whether to act. Parties can apply common criteria nationally, with provision for essential-use exceptions or extended timeframes, while those ready to move further do so together.
• Decision-making must be able to operationalize listings. COP arrangements should allow the timely adoption of listings and phase-out measures, with procedures for when consensus has been exhausted, so collective action is not stalled.

3. How can plastic product design be a useful tool to avoid plastic pollution? What mechanisms can be envisaged in the text to disseminate good practices in this field?

• Design should serve reduction and reuse first. YPAN's core position is reduction, not substitution. Design provisions should prioritize the reduction of virgin material and the scaling of reuse and refill systems, in line with the waste hierarchy.
• Common, and where appropriate binding, design requirements should be established. Requirements should promote chemical simplification, durability, repairability, recyclability, and safety, and prevent microplastic release.
• Existing local solutions should be restored and disseminated. Durable solutions often already exist within local culture. India's clay and banana-leaf plates, displaced by cheap plastic, have been revived at scale through India's railway system, showing that good practices can be shared and scaled with the right economic incentives.^[10]
• False solutions must be screened out. Mechanisms to disseminate good practice should be paired with safeguards against greenwashing and against bioplastics and oxo-degradables that do not degrade in real conditions, require absent composting infrastructure, or compete with food production.

4. What role, if any, should the instrument play in addressing existing and legacy plastic pollution, and through what types of provisions?

• Prevention is the most effective response to legacy pollution. Reducing future inflows through upstream measures and environmentally sound product design must come first, complemented by remediation rather than the reverse.
• Remediation should be rights-based and community-led. Clean-up and ecosystem restoration should be undertaken in partnership with affected communities, with safeguards so that clean-up does not become a distraction from systemic solutions or a reliance on unproven technological quick-fixes.
• Waste infrastructure should be resilient to disaster. Floods routinely overflow dumping sites and carry plastic into rivers, as seen along the Nile and in Haiti.^[11] Disaster resilience should be built into waste infrastructure itself, not limited to residential areas.
• Adequate means of implementation are essential. Legacy pollution falls hardest on the Global South, SIDS, and LDCs. Predictable financial, technical, and capacity-building support, accessible to community and youth-led organizations, should accompany any legacy provisions.

5. How can the instrument contribute to more effective waste management, including collection of plastic waste?

• Effective waste management starts upstream. Systems are constrained by the volume and composition of products placed on the market. Phasing out problematic products and chemicals of concern that hinder recycling is a precondition for system-wide effectiveness.
• Informal waste workers must be at the center. Legal recognition, safe working conditions, fair wages, healthcare access, and inclusion are non-negotiable. The ILO estimates more than 15 million people work as waste pickers globally,^[12] and any formalization that excludes them risks destroying livelihoods.
• Mandatory, eco-modulated EPR with social safeguards should be required. Producers should bear financial and operational responsibility for end-of-life management, consistent with the polluter pays principle, including recovery in countries that did not produce the original plastic.
• Harmful treatment technologies should be avoided. Provisions should steer away from open burning, incineration, and waste-to-energy approaches that sustain waste generation over prevention and that harm human health, including that of waste pickers.
• Rural and product-specific gaps must be addressed. Categories such as sanitary products and diapers, which are roughly 90% plastic^[13] and lack rural disposal infrastructure, require dedicated provisions and clear allocation of responsibility.

Cluster C

Capacity-building, technical assistance, and technology transfer, including international cooperation; financial resources and mechanism

On the detailed architecture of the financial mechanism, YPAN aligns with the broad direction expressed by many delegations and observers. Our distinct contribution is to insist that means of implementation reach the youth-led and community-based organizations already implementing solutions on the ground, and that finance be grounded in the polluter pays principle.

1. Can capacity-building, technical assistance, technology transfer, and financial support be integrated into a single coherent implementation package, or is it preferable to structure these as distinct but complementary obligations?

• Finance should be a standalone enabling pillar, with the others operationally linked. The ability of developing country Parties, including LDCs, SIDS, and LLDCs, to implement obligations depends fundamentally on the availability and accessibility of financial resources, which should not be subsumed within broader support measures.
• Technology transfer must include access and affordability. Transfer should cover both technical knowledge and the conditions for uptake, so that implementation is not constrained by cost barriers across different national circumstances.
• Support must reach the grassroots, not only large intermediaries. Youth-led and community-based organizations are already filling governance and infrastructure gaps but face barriers in financing, equipment, and recognition. Direct-access windows should be built into the package.

2. What institutional arrangements would be adequate to ensure that capacity-building efforts contribute effectively to the implementation of the agreement?

• Capacity-building should be demand-driven and tied to national needs. Arrangements should respond to identified implementation and compliance needs, with multi-level delivery that combines global oversight with regional and subregional support hubs.
• It should include reskilling for a just transition. Capacity-building should extend to green skills, social protection, and education for workers affected by the transition, including informal waste workers, not only to regulatory and technical capacity.
• Youth-led capacity-building has demonstrated reach and should be recognized. YPAN's MEA Bootcamp^[14], co-created with Dr. Alexandra R. Harrington, has engaged more than 10,000 participants across over 130 countries, including representatives from more than 40 government delegations. The Road to INC webinar series extends access to the negotiation process for those who cannot travel. These models show what demand-driven, accessible capacity-building can achieve.

3. How can the instrument create the incentives and send effective signals to the private sector to align with the objective of the instrument?

• Binding rules, not voluntary commitments, send durable signals. Voluntary corporate action is fragile and easily reversed: major quick-commerce platforms in India that had shifted to paper reverted entirely to plastic packaging in March 2026.^[15] Clear, predictable, legally binding rules provide regulatory certainty and a level playing field.
• First-mover penalties must be addressed. Companies that reduce plastic or invest in take-back systems are often undercut by competitors using cheaper or non-compliant plastic, as Uganda's Kaveera ban^[16] illustrates. Harmonized global rules remove this penalty.
• Mandatory due diligence and disclosure should be required. States should require Human Rights Due Diligence across the full plastics value chain and corporate disclosure of plastics-related risks, chemical composition, recyclability in practice, and lobbying activities, consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.^[17]
• Subsidy reform and green capital access are part of the signal. Fossil fuel and polymer subsidies make it cheaper to pollute than to prevent. Repurposing them, alongside affordable financing for green businesses, shifts incentives across the value chain. Private finance should complement, not replace, public finance.

4. What conditions would a financial mechanism deliver predictable and adequate support for implementation, and what criteria would be needed to assess adequacy?

• Support should be grant-based and concessional, grounded in polluter pays. Developed country Parties should take the lead, with high-income producing and consuming countries contributing within their capabilities. Support should not take the form of debt-generating instruments.
• Adequacy should be measured against real implementation and protection. Criteria should assess whether flows enable implementation, cover incremental costs and enabling activities, and reach the communities most affected. UNEP's Turning off the Tap report estimates that the systemic shift to a circular economy would require investment of roughly 65 billion US dollars per year through 2040, below the roughly 113 billion US dollars per year projected under a business-as-usual path.^[18]
• Accessibility to grassroots actors is a condition of adequacy. The problem is not only the scale of finance but its direction. UNEP's financing analysis finds that official development finance for solid waste management was only about 1.8 billion US dollars in 2021, under a tenth of estimated need, while more than 80% of private investment flowed to downstream solutions and emerging markets received only about 6%.^[19] A mechanism that is predictable on paper but inaccessible to youth and community organizations does not meet need. Direct access and simplified modalities should be built in so that finance reaches the Global South and upstream action.
• The mechanism should operate under COP authority with periodic review. It should be fully accountable to the COP, with adequacy and predictability reviewed periodically against an updated needs assessment.

5. What structure in the financial mechanism would be most appropriate? What could be the role of the GEF or a dedicated multilateral fund, and can the proposals coexist in a hybrid approach?

• A dedicated multilateral fund should serve as the core. It should provide predictable, grant-based, and concessional resources for enabling activities, implementation, and sectoral transformation, under the guidance and authority of the COP.
• A dedicated innovation window should support youth-led solutions. Within or alongside the core fund, a window for youth-led and community innovation would resource the actors already implementing solutions, consistent with a tiered model of trust fund, innovation fund, and GEF-linked facility.
• The GEF can play a complementary, enabling role. It could support enabling activities, pilot projects, and targeted technical assistance, leveraging existing capacity without replacing a dedicated, Convention-specific mechanism. The proposals can coexist in a hybrid approach provided roles are clearly defined.

Cluster D

Preamble; objective; principles and approaches; just transition; health; public information, awareness, education and research

1. Which general principles and approaches are essential to guide consistent decision-making across all provisions of the instrument? How should they be operationalized?

• A core set of principles should guide the whole instrument. The precautionary principle, the polluter pays principle, the waste hierarchy, a human rights-based approach, and intergenerational equity, together with life-cycle thinking and nature-positive approaches, should provide consistent direction across all provisions.
• Principles should appear in the Preamble and be embedded operatively. Reflecting principles in the Preamble provides interpretive direction, but they should also be embedded within substantive provisions so they actively guide obligations rather than remaining declaratory.
• Human rights and intergenerational equity must reach the operative text. YPAN's published priority is explicit on this point: human rights and intergenerational equity should be embedded throughout the treaty, including in the operative text, not confined to preambular language.
• The precautionary principle should reverse the burden of proof. Industry should be required to demonstrate safety prospectively, rather than communities having to demonstrate harm after exposure has begun, particularly for chemicals and product design.

2. What division of content can exist between the Preamble and principles and approaches, to avoid repetition and enhance coherence?

• The Preamble should set the interpretive frame. It should provide context and motivation, recall established international instruments, including HRC Resolution 48/13 and UNGA Resolution 76/300, and recognize that current levels of plastic production and consumption are unsustainable and that plastic pollution drives irreversible harm to biodiversity and ecosystems.
• The Preamble should characterize plastic accurately. It should recognize plastic as a pollutant and avoid language that frames plastics only by their utility, so that the interpretive spirit matches the mandate to end plastic pollution.
• Principles, being operative in nature, belong in substantive provisions. Rather than a standalone list, principles should be integrated where they can actively guide obligations, while being signposted in the Preamble for interpretive direction. This division reduces repetition and enhances coherence.

3. How should the instrument address the social and economic dimensions of the transition, and in what form: a standalone provision, preambular language, or integration within substantive articles?

• Just transition should be operationalized across substantive provisions. It should be integrated into provisions on EPR, waste management, and means of implementation rather than confined to declaratory preambular language, so that it shapes concrete obligations.
• The transition is plural and lifecycle-wide. As recognized in the UNFCCC Just Transition Work Programme^[20]transitions look different across countries and localities. Provisions should cover communities and workers affected by primary polymer production, not only downstream waste management.
• Informal worker inclusion is non-negotiable. Any transition that formalizes waste management without including informal waste workers, predominantly from marginalized communities, risks destroying their livelihoods. Their inclusion, with social protection and reskilling, must be built in from the start.
• Frontline and overburdened communities should be prioritized. Transition planning should protect fenceline and frontline communities to avoid reproducing a collateral sacrifice, and should ensure direct access to finance, including micro-finance, for those most affected.
• Rights anchors should be explicit. The transition should align with the ILO just transition framework and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, with attention to the rights to remedy, social security, free choice of employment, and an adequate standard of living.

4. How should the instrument address the relationship between plastic pollution and human health, and through what type of provision?

• Health protection should be reflected in the Objective. Consistent with UNEA Resolution 5/14, the protection of human health should sit in the objective alongside ending plastic pollution across the full lifecycle, rather than as a standalone or symbolic element.
• Health considerations should run across operative provisions. Plastic pollution is linked to human health throughout the lifecycle. Micro and nanoplastics have been found in the human bloodstream, placenta, and fetus, producing exposure even before birth.^[21] Health should guide provisions on production, chemicals, products, emissions, waste, and transparency.
• Binding measures on chemicals of concern are indispensable. Health provisions are insufficient without binding international measures to phase out and control chemicals of concern, prevent microplastic exposure, and address problematic and avoidable plastics. Hazard-based, group-level screening should replace slow chemical-by-chemical assessment.
• Monitoring and a right to know should protect the most exposed. Health monitoring for exposed communities, including informal workers, women, and children, and full chemical composition disclosure should be required. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control^[22] shows that a binding international health instrument is achievable.

5. How can public information, awareness, education, and research be structured to directly support implementation and behavioral change at scale?

• Plastics must be named as a human rights issue, not a cleanliness issue. Reframing is what determines whether meaningful behavioral change occurs. India's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan shifted attitudes on general waste but had limited impact on plastic precisely because it was framed around cleanliness rather than rights and health.
• Awareness, education, and research should be eligible for finance. These should be recognized as enabling activities resourced through the financial mechanism and the polluter pays principle, including EPR revenues, so that the cost of communicating risk falls on producers rather than exposed communities.
• Education should be experiential and embedded in curricula. We urge Member States to embed environmental education on this topic in school curricula, as part of implementing the UNEA-7 resolution on the meaningful participation of youth in environmental processes and on environmental education^[23].
• Trusted local structures and community data should anchor delivery. Community leaders, women's groups, youth networks, and informal workers are effective entry points, and community-generated data strengthens advocacy and local accountability, as in the Kampala hotspot mapping.
• The right to know should be operationalized through disclosure. Harmonized disclosure of material composition and chemical content along the full lifecycle, supported by accessible databases, enables informed consumer choice and behavioral change at scale.

For more information or questions about this document, contact admin@ypanplastics.com or YPAN Interim Chair Shellan Saling at ssaling2013@gmail.com.

To learn more about YPAN, visit https://www.cymgenv.net/ypan or https://linktr.ee/ypanplastics