Every time you throw away a soda bottle or a snack wrapper, it might end up on a beach thousands of miles away from you. Now, hard numbers back up what many suspected for years. The study, ‘Global producer responsibility for plastic pollution,’ published in Science Advances, has found that just 56 companies are behind the majority of branded plastic waste found in nature. Researchers say it is among the clearest data-backed efforts linking the amount of plastic a company produces to how much ends up polluting the world.
The five-year cleanup that named names
The findings come from a massive citizen-science effort. More than 200,000 volunteers collected trash during the period between 2018 and 2022, logging each brand they came across in 84 countries, as part of 1,576 individual audit actions. According to Break Free From Plastic, the group that conducted the majority of those audits, volunteers used a straightforward process for data collection: collect plastic waste, identify its brand. Some data were also gathered using the 5 Gyres Institute's TrashBlitz app. Through this approach, beach and park cleanups generated a large database on plastic pollution.
