This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva—plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of Friday—with no agreement on a global plastics treaty. During a closing plenary that started on Friday at 6:30 am, more than 15 hours after it was originally scheduled to begin, nearly all countries opposed an updated draft of the United Nations treaty that was put forward by the negotiating committee chair, the Ecuadorian diplomat Luis Vayas Valdivieso. Many of their delegates said the text did not reflect their mandate under a UN Environment Assembly resolution to “end plastic pollution” by addressing the “full life cycle” of plastics. “We are truly sad to say that we will not have a treaty to end plastic pollution here in Geneva,” the head negotiator for Norway, Andreas Bjelland Erikse, told the chair. Valdivieso wrapped up the meeting just after 9 am with the promise that they would continue at a later date. The decision ends a contentious week and a half of discussions during the “resumed” fifth session of negotiations over a United Nations plastics treaty, which started in Geneva on August 4. Delegates had arrived in the city hoping to finalize a treaty by Thursday, having already overrun their original deadline to complete the agreement by the end of 2024. Signs of a logjam were apparent even within the first few days of the talks, however, as countries hewed to the same red lines they’d stuck to during previous negotiations. A so-called “like-minded group” of oil-producing countries said it would not accept legally binding obligations and opposed a wide range of provisions that other nations said were essential, including controls on new plastic production, as well as mandatory disclosures and phaseouts of hazardous chemicals used in plastics. During a plenary on August 9, three observers independently told Grist that the negotiations felt like Groundhog Day, as countries reiterated familiar talking points. A norm around consensus-based decisionmaking discouraged compromise from all countries, though the like-minded group—which includes Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, among other countries—was particularly intransigent and understood it could simply block proposals rather than shift its positions. Instead of whittling down a draft of the treaty that had been prepared late last year during the previous meeting in Busan, South Korea, delegates added hundreds of suggestions to it, placing a deal further from reach. Over the course of the Geneva talks, delegates rejected two new drafts of the treaty prepared by Valdivieso: one released on Wednesday, which was so objectionable that countries said it was “repulsive” and lacked “any demonstrable value,” and the most recent one published just hours before Friday’s 6:30 am plenary. Many expressed their preference to revert back to the Busan draft as a basis for future discussions.