LONDON: Drink companies Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle were found to be the world's biggest producers of plastic trash, a report by environmental group Greenpeace said on Tuesday (Oct 9).
Working with the Break Free From Plastic movement, Greenpeace said it orchestrated 239 plastic clean-ups in 42 countries around the world, which resulted in the audit of 187,000 pieces of plastic trash. The aim was to get a picture of how large corporations contribute to the problem of pollution.
Coca-Cola, the world's largest soft drink maker, was the top waste producer, Greenpeace said, with Coke-branded plastic trash found in 40 of the 42 countries.
"These brand audits offer undeniable proof of the role that corporations play in perpetuating the global plastic pollution crisis," said Von Hernandez, global coordinator for Break Free From Plastic.
Overall, the most common type of plastic found was polystyrene, which goes into packaging and foam coffee cups, followed closely by PET, used in bottles and containers.
"We share Greenpeace's goal of eliminating waste from the ocean and are prepared to do our part to help address this important challenge," a Coke spokesman said in a statement. The company has pledged to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one it sells by 2030.
All three companies have made pledges about their packaging for 2025. Coke says all its packaging will be recyclable, Nestle says it will be recyclable or reusable and PepsiCo says it will be recyclable, compostable or biodegradable.
They are all also working to use recycled content in their packaging.
Nestle, the world's largest food and drink maker, said it recognised the issue and is working hard to eliminate non-recyclable plastics. It said it was also exploring different packaging solutions and ways to facilitate recycling and eliminate plastic waste.
PepsiCo was not immediately available to comment outside regular U.S. business hours.
Rycross on October 9th, 2018 at 16:33 UTC »
This is pretty easy to believe, but I tend to be skeptical when Greenpeace puts out these reports, because they have a history of picking popular products and putting their finger on the scales in order to drum up publicity.
The examples that come to mind were when they called out the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone as being top of their class in non-green construction, when in fact what happened was that they just didn't have publicly available info, and Greenpeace used that as an opportunity to give them F's without actually digging into the actual practices. Turns out that while they aren't green per-se, they were also better than a lot of the competition that they scored worse against.
When this was pointed out, the dishonesty was hand-waved away as "Greenpeace is the environmental movement! Its ok that they tell little white lies to get people to pay attention!"
EsplainingThings on October 9th, 2018 at 13:40 UTC »
We used to use reusable glass bottles for beverages, but disposable cans and plastic bottles move the expenses of dealing with the leftovers from the bottling company to elsewhere and maximizes profits.
We used to have paper bags too, but people crying about trees pushed retailers into plastic bags.
838h920 on October 9th, 2018 at 13:12 UTC »
News: Biggest international companies create more waste than smaller counterparts.