PLASTIC & POLLUTION

I was trying to understand who makes plastic and why. In doing so I found two major trends: smart companies that deliberately use plastic for its durability in order to make long lasting goods, and all other companies that use plastic for its versatility, simplicity, weight and price. The first set of companies use plastic in water pipelines, or in cars. The other set of companies use it mostly to sell water in plastic bottles or have a nice vivid packaging for their cleaning product.

Right now we are producing somewhere between 300 and 410 million tonnes of plastic annually (I have to find the most reliable source for th. Of wich 8 million end up in the ocean. 

In the spring of 2019 Coca-Cola and several other companies published their plastic output in the Global Commitment Report  Most companies who signed a pledge to participate in this fenomenal endeavour had not yet disclosed their plastic output. Only about 4.6% of total global plastic production is reported there so far, but  other companies will start to disclose and I will do some of my own research. 

I extracted the data from the report and assembled it in a form of a chart above. It shows clearly that FMCG companies are the major plastic producers and what is very troubling is that almost all of their plastic goes to landfill within a year and because of the people negligence some of it ends up in rivers and rivers bring it to the oceans.

Coca-Cola alone is responsible for around 1% of plastic produced globally. I will need to verify my coclulations but I estimate, that LEGO produces 30 times less plastic and what is more important, their plastic does not end up in the landfill most of the times.