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Plastic pollution is everywhere in the world. Much of it comes from fewer than 60 multinationals in the food, beverage and tobacco industries, including Nestlé, Danone, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Philip Morris, new research reports.
Plastic pollution is everywhere in the world. Much of it comes from fewer than 60 multinationals in the food, beverage and tobacco industries, including Nestlé, Danone, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Philip Morris, new research reports.
Published in the journal Science Advances, this analysis was carried out by an international group of researchers. According to their findings, 56 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world's plastic pollution, and six of them alone account for a quarter of this pollution! The research is based on a close examination of over 1,870,000 pieces of plastic waste collected by volunteers in 84 countries between 2018 and 2022. Most of the waste collected was single-use packaging for food, drinks and tobacco products.
Of all the product packaging collected, only half still bore the name of the company that marketed the product. The five brands most frequently identified on packaging worldwide were The Coca-Cola Company (11%), PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%) and Altria/Philip Morris (2%). "There was a clear and strong log-log linear relationship production (%) = pollution (%) between companies’ annual production of plastic and their branded plastic pollution, with food and beverage companies being disproportionately large polluters," the researchers write in their paper.
In view of these findings, the researchers underline the need for greater transparency in the production and labelling of plastic products and packaging: "Action by these companies, whether voluntary or mandated by governments or an international legally binding instrument, can positively address the problem," the researchers suggest. In particular, they advocate the creation of an open-access international database in which companies would be obliged to quantitatively track and report their products, packaging, brands and releases to the environment. The development of international standards for the marking of packaging to facilitate identification would also be a practical solution, the study's authors argue.
Currently, talks among negotiators representing 175 countries are underway in Ottawa, Canada to draft a world-first legally-binding global UN treaty on plastics pollution, including in the marine environment:
