The two tobacco companies Altria and Philip Morris International combined made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, both Danone and Nestlé each produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.
This is for large plastics. Big pieces of trash.
Microplastics are almost entirely just tire dust.
Last I heard was about 75%
It’s a lot but a pretty far cry from “almost entirely“.
When they grind up large plastic it turns into small plastic
And yet even still the overwhelming majority of that “small plastic” is just… tire dust. That’s still the bulk of the material.
That’s the vast scale of automobile pollution. Another piece of how horrific auto-centric society is for the entire planet.
And yoga pants. Don’t forget yoga pants. Though if I get rare cancer, I hope it’s from girls in yoga pants.
Survey finds that 60 firms own half of the worlds companies.
11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.
More than ten percent from a single company…
Is it also a pretty safe bet these are most of the top 60 companies in the world, and we are the ones that buy all their generic crap in plastic containers?
No. It is the faceless people who are to blame. Not me.
It’s really about who litters surely?
Surface level - yeah I suppose? What about those who make it, those who don’t dispose of it correctly, then those in waste management who don’t care where it ends up?
It seems everyone in that chain has a responsibility of waste management. When costs inflate and services are reduced we see increased fly-tipping, and litter produced by uncollected bins, as well as shoddy disposal.
I think it’s closely related to the broken window theory. One broken window = more crime. Some litter = more litter. Most are led by influence.
I think you’ve hit it on the head with everyone in the chain being responsible- and I’ve never heard of the broken window theory but it makes alot of sense.
I wonder that any time these statistics are brought up. Like 100 companies are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gases - well isn’t it cause there’s 8 billion people buying their shit? They’re not just running those factories for the fun of it.
Study is here:
Thank you, kind stranger!
On those drink companies alone we have 21% of all plastic waste. Amazon packaging has to be a good 30% probably.
when will something start to be done about this :(
When society fails
It could end tomorrow.
Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.
The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.
This seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the biggest companies with the most easily identifiable packaging are going to be the ones identified in this study. The majority of the plastic, however, is not, and it’s difficult to tell who produced it.
The article addresses this as well, mentioning that this is the reason we need traceability, so we can get the true metrics on who is creating and thus responsible for the bulk of plastic waste.
The big players like Coke and others are obviously very much responsible for a big part of the problem. I just didn’t see people mentioning this part of the study in the comments, so I wanted to bring it up.
