Top 3 Global Polluters: Coca Cola, PepsiCo & Nestlé
Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), a global plastic free movement that first launched in 2016, has named The Coca Cola Company, PepsiCo and Nestlé as the top three companies and brands amongst their Top Global Plastic Polluters for the third year in a row in their 2020 Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit.
The #BreakFreeFromPlastic global movement has been auditing international corporations and brands to track their progress towards a future free of plastics. Since their launch in 2016, they have worked towards eliminating the production and usage of single-use plastics while encouraging and enforcing lasting solutions instead. Their focus remains on entirely preventing the entire chain of plastic consumption from extraction to disposal rather than finding or creating a cure for this prevailing issue.
In the 2020 report “BRANDED Vol III: Demanding Corporate Accountability for Plastic Pollution” that was released earlier this month on December 2nd, 2020 via a virtual press conference, it was reported that 14,734 volunteers across 55 countries conducted 575 brand audits and collected 346,494 individual pieces of plastic waste. According to the BFFP report, 63% of the over 346 thousand collected pieces were clearly marked with the brand to which the plastic piece belonged, and amongst those brand marked pieces, it was determined that Coca Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé had made “zero progress” and were continuing to cause a massive amount of plastic wastage even during a pandemic.
The BFFP Top 10 Global Polluters list includes The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Unilever, Mondelez International, Mars Inc., Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris International, Colgate-Palmolive, and Perfetti Van Melle. Coca Cola remained the top polluter on a global basis due to their easily recognizable plastic beverage bottles that were found in abundance across beaches, parks, rivers and other sites amongst 51 of the total 55 countries part of the survey report. While 7 of these companies have joined The New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, an Ellen MacArthur report states that they have only been able to reduce plastic use by 0.1% from 2018 to 2019.
The BFFP calls on companies indulging in single-use plastics “to urgently reduce the amount of single-use plastic they use” and reveal “how much single-use plastic they use, then set clear, measurable targets for reducing the quantity of single-use plastic items they produce.” These companies are also required to “reinvent their product delivery systems to move beyond single-use plastic”.
What do you think about this report, the findings, and the call-to-action by BFFP to the plastic-indulging brands across the world?
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Credit: BreakFreeFromPlastic.org
