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1y ago

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

www.theguardian.com

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.

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1y ago

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

www.theguardian.com /environment/2024/apr/24/survey-finds-that-60-firms-are-responsible-for-half-of-worlds-plastic-pollution

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1y ago

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

www.theguardian.com /environment/2024/apr/24/survey-finds-that-60-firms-are-responsible-for-half-of-worlds-plastic-pollution

News @lemmy.world

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1y ago

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

www.theguardian.com /environment/2024/apr/24/survey-finds-that-60-firms-are-responsible-for-half-of-worlds-plastic-pollution

39 comments

Time for the beneficiary's of these companies to start footing the bill for cleaning up their garbage.
- Nah, best we can do is privatize the profits and let the public pay the costs.
- https://www.instagram.com/p/C6BdB99CSs4/?igsh=M21mYmh1Z3N1OXJt
- But the economy! 😭
- That is a good idea. I wouldn't want to loose the convenience of buying coke in a plastic bottle. So instead, make these firms legally commit to investing in clean up programs so at least some of the litter will be recovered.
  
  Coke in glass or metal is indistinguishable.
  Let's just use the leverage of it being so few companies to force them to do what's right.
  
  Glass is just as convenient
  
  It doesn't work like that. The biggest danger of plastic waste is that it can release microplastics into our waterways and food supply. You can clean up tossed bottles, but you can't clean microplastics.

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“.
- And yoga pants. Don't forget yoga pants. Though if I get rare cancer, I hope it's from girls in yoga pants.
- 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.

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...

When I buy a bottle of Coca-Cola I am not actually paying much for the sugary water. I'm paying for the convenience of having it in a bottle.
In my mind, this convenience fee ought to be enough to pay for the convenience of also discarding said bottle. Otherwise, they really sold me the inconvenience of having to deal with the bottle that they use to distribute the sugary water.
So, get on with it, Coca-Cola, clean up your shit. I already paid you.
- This is really close to truth. So many of those products producing trash are useless (bottled water) or even actively harmful (soda, cigarettes). You don't actually need to pay Coca-Cola at all. You just need a reusable bottle and a water fountain or tap.
  Coca-Cola and Phillip Morris will not suddenly start being helpful.
  In that sense: encourage your municipality, employers, etc. to set up public water fountains and no-smoking zones. (And if you really want sweet drinks, buy syrups.)
- I believe this is true, Circle K gas station near me still has soda fountain drinks for 80-110 cents. The cans and bottles start at 2.50 or more.
- I'm old enough that it was normal and not a hassle to bring your glass bottles to buy Coke and wherever fizzy drinks. But at one point that option disappeared.
  Also it helped that a family dinner would consume like a liter, and we didn't have it everyday.

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?
- 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:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj8275
- Thank you, kind stranger!

It’s not their fault! People should recycle everything! /s

On those drink companies alone we have 21% of all plastic waste. Amazon packaging has to be a good 30% probably.
- Excuse my ignorance but what is Amazon packaging? Everything I've ever gotten from Amazon was packaged in cardboard, but maybe that's a local thing.
  
  Don't forget the big plastic bubble bags they use to pad the product inside.
  In my experience, they send your purchase in a box that's easily 4x the necessary size, with the padding bubbles taking up the rest of the space.
  
  Every now and then I'd get the package in one of those opaque gray plastic bags that many postal services use. Probably means those.

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.

39 comments