When Majid Motani was a boy in the early 1960s, his mother would send him to the market with a metal container for oil or milk and a woven basket for groceries. Plastic bags were nowhere to be seen.
"Now, that practice is gone," says Motani, a Karachi-based fisherman since 1967, tells TRT World.
"Every household now uses plastic bags, sometimes up to 30 in a single day, for everything from groceries to medicines," he says.
Along Karachi's 129-kilometre coastline, the consequences of unrestricted plastic use are dire.
Each monsoon season, hundreds of tonnes of plastic waste - shopping bags, bottles, and packaging for chips and biscuits - pour into the Arabian Sea through rainwater drains.
"Our nets get entangled with plastic bags. Fishermen spend all day removing them," Motani says.
The seabed, blackened by sunken plastics, repels fish, threatening the livelihoods of Karachi's fishing communities, he says.
"Plastic is probably the number one problem for us," he adds.
This local crisis mirrors a global one.
Plastic pollution is choking oceans, killing marine life, and destroying livelihoods in fishing communities.
It was against this background that representatives from over 170 countries gathered at the Palais des Nations in Geneva from August 5 to 15 for the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, officially called INC-5.2.
Initiated by a 2022 UN Environment Assembly resolution, the latest round of talks aimed to address plastic pollution across its lifecycle, from production to disposal.
More than 400 million tonnes of new plastic are produced every year. Without policy intervention, plastic production is expected to go up by 70 percent by 2040.
Only seven countries, led by China and the US, produce two-thirds of the world's plastic every year.
Yet the negotiations for the binding treaty to curb plastic pollution collapsed, derailed by a sudden 180-degree shift in US policy that apparently prioritised industry interests over global environmental action.
The Global Plastics Treaty was envisioned as a landmark agreement - one like the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer or the Paris Agreement - to tackle a crisis costing the world $1.5 trillion a year.
More than 100 countries, part of the so-called High Ambition Coalition, pushed for bold measures: legally binding targets to reduce plastic production, phase out harmful chemicals, promote recycling, and set up schemes to make producers pay for waste management.
The treaty also sought to support vulnerable communities, like Karachi's fishermen, through financial mechanisms for a just transition.
Marcus Eriksen, an environmental scientist and a vocal advocate for the treaty, tells TRT World that downstream solutions like recycling fail to address harm at the source.
"Single-use plastics cause damage before they're ever cleaned up, shredding into microplastics that are impossible to remove," he says.
Recycling is often uneconomical without massive subsidies - something that makes upstream measures, like production standards and eliminating toxic chemicals, far more effective, he adds.
The US about-turn
The world's second-largest plastic producer, the US, initially aligned with high-ambition nations like the EU and Japan.
But under President Donald Trump, who took office in January 2025, the US stance shifted dramatically.
At INC-5.2, the US advocated a "low-ambition" approach, prioritising waste management over production cuts.