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Sunday, April 28th, 2024

56 Companies Responsible for Half of Global Plastic Pollution That Researchers Could Trace

Author:     Paige Bennett
Source:     EcoWatch
Publication Date:     April 25, 2024
 Link: 56 Companies Responsible for Half of Global Plastic Pollution That Researchers Could Trace
Stephan:  

Materialism and greed are destroying the earth’s matrix of life, and plastic pollution is a major factor in this. Just 56 companies are responsible for over 50% of the branded plastic items that are creating this pollution, led by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Think about that for a minute. A minuscule number of corporations are impacting the wellbeing of over 8 billion people, as well as trillions of other beings, and they are doing it for one reason, greed. Profit is literally more important to them than life itself. What can you do about this? Don’t buy, drink, eat or use anything that is plastic until corporations start using only plastic that degrades biologically. Recycling is not enough, because much of it never gets collected and recycled. The vulnerability of greed is people stop buying what a company is offering for sale that involves plastics. If they know enough people are not buying their products for that reason their greed will force them to change.

Plastic bottles littering a beach in Norway. Credit: Bo Eide / Flickr

A new study on plastic pollution in 84 countries has linked half of branded plastic pollution to only 56 firms, with about 24% of the branded plastic waste analyzed connected to only five companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone and Altria.

A team of researchers analyzed plastic pollution data from the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit. The data spanned a total of 1,576 brand audit events over five years, from 2018 to 2022. 

The analysis revealed about 52% of the 1,873,634 plastic items in the study were unbranded, which could be because sunlight, water or other environmental factors caused fading on labels.

“We found over 50% of plastic items were unbranded, highlighting the need for better transparency about production and labeling of plastic products and packaging to enhance traceability and accountability,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances. “We suggest creation of an international, open-access database into which companies are obliged to […]

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2 Comments

  1. Albus Eddie on Sunday, April 28, 2024 at 5:47 am

    Corporations are using (abusing) the earth as a commons to cost shift the clean up of their packaging to governments at large. The classic “privatize the profits, socialize the costs” model. We can mandate, for example, returning to glass bottling which can easily be recycled. The question is: Do we have the political will? This model can be replicated to many other industries. The structures are in place. Corporations must be forced to use them.

  2. Susan Applegate on Monday, April 29, 2024 at 12:11 pm

    Requiring companies world wide to identify the plastic they produce and market for consumers to see is a necessary step to take in reducing plastic waste build-up.