Global producer responsibility for plastic pollution

Authors
Win Cowger, Kathryn A. Willis, Sybil Bullock, Katie Conlon, Jorge Emmanuel, Lisa M. Erdle, Marcus Eriksen, Trisia A. Farrelly, Britta Denise Hardesty, Kristiina Kerge, Natalie Li, Yedan Li, Adam Liebman , Neil Tangri , Martin Thiel, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, Tony R. Walker, Mengjiao Wang

Abstract
Brand names can be used to hold plastic companies accountable for their items found polluting the environment. We used data from a 5-year (2018–2022) worldwide (84 countries) program to identify brands found on plastic items in the environment through 1576 audit events. We found that 50% of items were unbranded, calling for mandated producer reporting. The top five brands globally were The Coca-Cola Company (11%), PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%), and Altria (2%), accounting for 24% of the total branded count, and 56 companies accounted for more than 50%. 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. Phasing out single-use and short-lived plastic products by the largest polluters would greatly reduce global plastic pollution.

Copyright © 2024 the Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. no claim to original U.S. Government Works. distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license 4.0 (CC BY).

Published: 2024