Busan, South Korea — While global plastics treaty talks are in a tenuous spot, support for a fee on virgin resin in any agreement is growing.

The United States, the European Union and Japan now are endorsing the idea — proposed Nov. 28 by a bloc including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — that the treaty allow nations to adopt “primary plastic polymer fees” along with extended producer responsibility systems and other financing to pay for the treaty.

It’s the most prominent support that such fees on virgin plastics have gotten in the negotiations, which are up against a Dec. 1 deadline to finish. The talks have some major hurdles to overcome, including strong opposition from oil-producing countries to anything seen as limiting plastic production.

Nonetheless, the resin fee language from the U.S.-led group was part of the latest version of the treaty’s draft framework, released Nov. 29

The U.S. proposal doesn’t set specific levels for the fee, leaving that for later, and it’s voluntary.

It comes after Ghana, a longtime advocate for resin fees, submitted its own detailed proposal earlier this week. It called for countries to be required to set plastic fees and for some of the money to be distributed globally to help developing countries.

Ghana’s proposal did not discuss the amount of the fee, but a report prepared by the Minderoo Foundation estimates that a fee of $60-$90 per metric ton, or about 5-7 percent of the price of plastics, would generate about $30 billion a year globally.

In its statement, Ghana said there’s a “large financing gap for developing countries” to pay for improved waste management and recycling, as well as develop reuse systems, alternative materials and other ways to reduce plastics in the environment.

Ghana said the cost of cleaning up legacy plastics pollution could be as high as $13 billion a year.

“Research shows that a small fee on primary polymer producers could play an outsized role in ending plastic pollution — creating significant positive … impacts in developing countries, without negative impacts for producers or consumers, and without distorting competition,” Ghana said, in its formal submission.

It’s not clear if a fee will wind up in the final treaty.

Major oil producing countries have opposed restrictions on supply, such as caps on plastic production.

As well, a group of global plastics producers at the talks, the International Council of Chemical Associations, has argued against fees. It did not comment on the U.S. and Ghana proposals but in the past has said resin fees would raise prices and hurt lower-income consumers.

However, a researcher who prepared a resin fee report for Minderoo said plastic fees should be in the treaty because EPR and other global financial tools will not provide enough money to properly address problems, including bringing waste management to the 2 billion-plus people in the world who don’t have it.

“We’re not going to get that from a combination of multilateral finance and EPR,” said Joe Papineschi, chairperson of Eunomia Research & Consulting. “That’s going to need to be topped up from other sources, and the plastic polymer fee idea is to me, one of the best ideas on the table for how to do that.”

In remarks at a Nov. 27 Minderoo Foundation event on the sidelines of the treaty talks, he said that consumer goods companies are supporting EPR, meaning they are calling to be regulated and to pay to improve recycling and waste management.

But he said the public should put pressure on petrochemical companies to also pay, in the form of a resin fee.

“What the world needs is for citizens and consumers to be putting increasing pressure on the chemical and petrochemicals industry on this fee idea and other significant changes that those industries need to make,” Papineschi said.

He did say that any fee, if adopted, would be voluntary.

“I would hope to see [resin fees] in the treaty somewhere, more likely voluntary than mandatory, because there are too many countries who at the moment see it as not in their economic interest to introduce something like this,” Papineschi said.

Even if the fee concept emerges in what is adopted in Busan, details would be determined later.

The Ghana proposal said the treaty’s first implementation meeting, or Conference of Parties, would set the fee levels. Ghana also said the amount of any fees would be set by each country, and would not be imposed by the treaty.

The countries, who make up the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, said a fee could have advantages over other revenue streams because there are relatively few virgin resin makers worldwide, and it said a levy could reduce economic imbalances that hurt recycled resin.

“If designed accordingly, the levy could … narrow the price difference between virgin plastics and the currently more expensive recycled or bio-based plastics, encouraging a shift toward more sustainable options,” the task force’s report said.