Study confirms Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are worst offenders
Fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with six responsible for a quarter of that, based on the findings of a piece of research published on Wednesday.
The researchers concluded that for every percentage increase in plastic produced, there was an equivalent increase in plastic pollution in the environment.
“Production really is pollution,” says one of the study’s authors, Lisa Erdle, director of science at the non-profit The 5 Gyres Institute.
An international team of volunteers collected and surveyed more than 1,870,000 items of plastic waste across 84 countries over five years: the bulk of the rubbish collected was single-use packaging for food, beverage, and tobacco products.
I would’ve expected a slightly different order, but those companies also control about 24% of the food we buy, so… not surprising.
Really? That’s exactly the order I would have expected.
PepsiCo is bigger than Coke, for one
PepsiCo owns Lays, which makes dry food. Coca-Cola mostly stays with beverages these days.
Sure, but some of that food is in plastic containers. Pepsi owns a shit ton of brands. By revenue, they are twice as big as Coke
I’d say the facts speak for themselves.
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Then it makes them four times more ecological in a way, if that’s even applicable to a company producing that much pollution
I expected McDonald’s to be up there.
Maccies has had paper cups, fry holders and wrappers for at least two decades, and now everything used within the, er, “restaurant” is reusable
Is it different where you are?
They still use plastic straws in some places, and paper cups contain plastic, but yeah they don’t seem to produce so much of (plastic) waste
Definitely plastic cups but paper straws for some reason
They mostly don’t make their own plastic containers. You have to make a shitton of plastic bottles and caps to make money and there are companies that only make empty plastic bottles and companies that only make plastic caps. Look at the bottom of your plastic bottles and caps for Logos of the companies that produced them.
Did you read the article? It’s not about who made the plastic containers at all, it’s about which company made the product that they contain.
When they hire a private company to make their packaging, then there are no public records on how much plastic they actually buy. (It’s in the millions of tons per year range) It also doesn’t account for the amount of energy used to produce packaging (it’s a a fuckton)
I didn’t know why I’m being downvoted, I worked at a plastic bottle factory making millions of bottles per day for many different big companies, including some listed there. They make the bottles and ship them empty to the companies to be filled.