20 companies responsible for most single-use plastic waste

Single-use plastics – the cheap plastic goods we use once and then throw away – epitomize the plastics crisis. Today, single-use plastics account for over a third of plastics produced every year, with 98% manufactured from fossil fuels.

The Plastic Waste Makers Index

Published by the Minderoo Foundation, the Plastic Waste Makers Index has been developed with partners including Wood Mackenzie, and experts from the London School of Economics and the Stockholm Environment Institute, among others. SEI Senior Research Fellow Toby Gardner advised on the work, and the Trase initiative contributed to the development of datasets and methods used in the report.

Key messages from the analysis include:

• Twenty companies are the source of more than half of all single-use plastic thrown away globally. ExxonMobil tops the list – contributing 5.9 million tonnes to global plastic waste – closely followed by US chemicals company Dow and China’s Sinopec. One hundred companies are behind 90 per cent of global single-use plastic production.
• Close to 60 per cent of the commercial finance funding of single-use production comes from just 20 global banks. A total of US$30 billion of loans from these institutions – which include Barclays, HSBC and Bank of America – has gone to the sector since 2011.
• Twenty asset managers – led by US companies Vanguard Group, BlackRock and Capital Group – hold over US$300 billion worth of shares in the parent companies of single-use plastic polymer producers. Of this, US$10 billion is directly linked to single-use polymer production.

“Change must be possible”

Toby Gardner responded to the question “Is change possible?” in an interview with TRT World:

“Change must be possible – there are few issues that attract so much attention as plastic pollution. The fact that we all have tiny plastic particles in our bodies should give us all sufficient pause for thought. We need to reduce the use of single-use plastics, but where they are necessary it is vital that we drive a transition towards a circular economy based on recycled materials and not virgin polymers from fossil fuels. Consumer pressure is key, but the real action needs to come from companies, investors and governments.”

“Revealing the sheer scale of the global crisis we have on our hands, it’s critical we break the pattern of inaction. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Building on this unique analysis just published, it is very important that the small group of companies and banks that dominate global production of throwaway plastics begin to disclose their own data,” Gardner concluded.

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