Today: Plastic pollution negotiations start in Geneva; Western worries over China’s minerals grip; Florida’s suburban boom has a smelly reality.

Welcome back: Global negotiators are heading to Geneva this week to try to get companies and countries to curb plastic pollution. They are hoping the sixth time will be the charm.

Delegates will be debating the terms of the Global Plastics Treaty—a United Nations-backed effort to address the environmental harm caused by plastics that has been the subject of five previous conferences since 2022, WSJ Pro Sustainable Business reports.

A group of more than 90 countries are pushing to get an ambitious agreement together, curbing production of plastics and its raw materials like crude oil, reducing the use of particularly harmful chemicals as well as improving waste-management efforts such as collection and recycling.

But negotiators from a handful of countries have voiced opposition—namely those from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia, India and China, which are all major oil and petrochemical producing countries.

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China is limiting the flow of critical minerals to Western defense manufacturers, delaying production and forcing companies to scour the world for stockpiles of the minerals needed to make everything from bullets to jet fighters.

Earlier this year, as U.S.-China trade tensions soared, Beijing tightened the controls it places on the export of rare earths. While Beijing allowed them to start flowing after the Trump administration agreed in June to a series of trade concessions, China has maintained a lock on critical minerals for defense purposes. China supplies around 90% of the world’s rare earths and dominates the production of many other critical minerals, the WSJ’s John Emont, Heather Somerville and Alistair MacDonald reports.

As a result, one drone-parts manufacturer that supplies the U.S. military was forced to delay orders by up to two months while it searched for a non-Chinese source of magnets, which are assembled from rare earths.

See also: America’s Biggest Rare-Earth Producer Makes a Play to End China’s Dominance

As suburban sprawl continues across Florida, it’s inevitably producing more human waste, and increasing pressure to find companies to process it. Outside St. Augustine, Indianhead Biomass mixes treated sewage sludge with yard debris to create compost piles up to 30-feet high.

Its neighbors are now raising a stink about the stench, the WSJ’s Kris Maher writes.

The smell, which is rallying neighbors across the city, mirrors a fight being replayed across the country over treated human waste, known as biosolids. The U.S. generates at least 4 million dry metric tons of it annually, according to data from the 41 states tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency. About 60% of that is treated to remove pathogens and applied to farms and gardens, although more states are tightening regulations on the use given concerns about PFAS contamination in particular. The rest is landfilled or incinerated.

But the creep of development is also prompting fights in communities where people say their lives and property values are suffering from proximity to sewage sludge.

• American consumers are getting thrifty again (WSJ)
   
• Exxon could slow hydrogen, low carbon projects after U.S. tax bill (Bloomberg)
   
• Inside the ‘radical transformation’ of America’s environmental role (NYT)
   
• World in $1.5 trillion ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns (Guardian)
   
• See you in court: Judicial action is key driver of sustainability outcomes (Trellis)

• Chocolate cartels: the rise of cocoa smuggling (FT)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at wsjperry, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.