10 Worst Plastic Polluting Companies Found by Global Cleanups

realcleverscience:

rjzimmerman:

When I was a kid, I used to hate situations in which an older person would tell us, “When I was a kid, we used to………..” or “When I was younger……….” and so on. The polite listening, fidgeting while waiting for an escape route, secretive rolling of the eyes, and so on.

But I will now do what I used to hate…….when I was a kid, soda or pop (whatever you call it in your place) was sold in glass bottles. Those glass bottles were also a source of income, because when you bought the soda or pop, you had to leave a deposit of 2¢ to 5¢ per bottle. So we in the neighborhood gang would run around with the wagon and collect bottles in vacant yards, side of the road, ditches, beach, playgrounds, wherever, and turn them in for money. Which we used usually to buy candy and comic books. (I wonder if that also applied to beer…..never worried about it, because when I got to drinking age, beer was mostly sold in cans.)

So why can’t we return to glass bottles, or at least more glass bottles than are being sold now? Probably because the fossil fuel industry would have a hissy fit.

Excerpt:

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé were identified as the world’s biggest producers of plastic trash in global cleanups and brand audits, a new report from Greenpeace and the Break Free From Plastic movement reveals.

Over the span of nine months, an international team of volunteers sorted through 187,000 pieces of plastic trash collected from 239 cleanups in 42 countries around the world.

The results, released Tuesday, shows that these multinational food and beverage giants were the top 10 offenders:

Coca-Cola

PepsiCo

Nestlé

Danone

Mondelez International

Procter & Gamble

Unilever

Perfetti van Melle

Mars Incorporated

Colgate-Palmolive

In the U.S. specifically, a total of 70 cleanups determined that Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola were the worst corporate plastic polluters, in that order.

The three companies have each pledged to cut their packaging waste. Coca-Cola has a global goal to help collect and recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. Nestlé aims to make 100 percent recyclable or reusable packaging by 2025. PepsiCo has a goal to design 100 percent of its packaging to be recyclable, compostable or biodegradable and to reduce its packaging’s carbon impact by 2025.

Name and Shame!