Corporations churn out single-use plastic packaging by the truckload – disposable yogurt cups, takeout containers, shopping bags, mailboxes, plastic wrap and more. These items consist of many of the 19 million metric tons of plastic waste that ends up in the environment every year. As such, many companies have made vague promises to address the plastic pollution crisis by increasing the recyclability of their packaging and reducing the amount of virgin material they use.
But they are not doing enough.
Dozens of the world’s largest companies lack both ambition and action to ensure plastic packaging doesn’t end up in landfills or litter the environment, according to a new analysis published Wednesday by shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow. Too few companies have quantitative sustainability targets for plastics, the report says, and those that do either set the bar too low or aren’t making significant progress – or both.
“Every company can do more,” says Kelly McBee, circular economy manager at As You Sow and one of the report’s co-authors. In particular, she said corporations should put more emphasis on reducing the plastic they use, rather than replacing non-standard plastics with recycled content.
For its report, As You Sow looked at annual reports, sustainability reports, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other publicly available resources from 225 of the world’s most valuable companies in five sectors: apparel, food and beverage, household products, quick-service restaurants and retail. The nonprofit evaluated these corporations on six criteria related to promoting a “circular economy for plastic packaging,” referring to a system that keeps plastic in use as long as possible before it has to be thrown away.
These criteria included the recyclability of companies’ plastic packaging, whether that packaging was made from recycled materials, and how much of it was reusable. The report also considered companies’ efforts to reduce plastic use and support extended producer responsibility, or EPR, policies that would make them financially responsible for managing their plastic packaging after it is sold to consumers.
Each company was given scores for overall ambition and overall performance, which together added up to a letter grade. Measurable steps were weighted more heavily than targets “to elevate the importance of action over words,” as McBee put it.
No company got an A, and only nine got a B. Half got an F, and almost every industry was characterized by “unambitious to modest goals” with “slow progress” toward achieving them. The industries with the highest average scores were cosmetics, household products, alcoholic beverages and consumer electronics. At the bottom were hospitality, chemicals and motor vehicles.
This is not the first time As You Sow has investigated companies contributing to the plastic crisis. Previous reports in 2020 and 2021 ranked a smaller group of companies on their commitments to sustainable packaging and found similar shortcomings on re-use, data transparency and financial contributions to waste management infrastructure.
In its most recent report, As You Sow also found that few companies had a quantitative, time-bound target for switching to reusable packaging, although many had pilot programs. And of the 147 companies with a package recyclability goal, only 15 percent were on track to meet it.
These findings align with what some other groups have found about the gap between companies’ plastic promises and their actions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes a circular economy, reported last year that corporations that signed up to its “global commitment” to promote plastic circularity has collectively made no progress in reducing virgin plastic use since 2018.
Other analyzes suggested that most are large companies of course to meet self-imposed targets for plastic recycling by 2025.
Melissa Valliant, communications director for the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics, said these findings are in some ways not surprising. “Historically, goals of the largest consumer goods companies have served as pretty PR stunts that generate news and reassure the public,” she told Grist. She said As You Sow’s findings highlight the need for government regulation – not just voluntary corporate commitments – to speed companies’ progress.
Of all the ways companies can make their plastic promises more credible, McBee says her top recommendation is to think beyond goals to just their virgin plastic use, referring to plastics made directly from fossil fuels. Companies with such a goal tend to replace their virgin plastics with recycled materials—a trade-off that can increase circularity but doesn’t address what As You Sow calls “a key driver of pollution”: the overuse of plastic.
As You Sow calls on companies to reduce their “plastic use intensity,” or the amount of plastic used for every dollar of revenue. This can be accomplished by redesigning packaging to have less surface area or thinner plastic layers, or by eliminating unnecessary types of plastic packaging.
In particular, reducing plastic use intensity is not the same as reducing net plastic use. If a company produces much more of a given product, its overall use of plastic packaging can grow even if it makes less plastic per dollar earned. This is essentially what happened to Coca-Cola, what in its most recent sustainability report that it “avoided half a million metric tons of virgin plastic” by 2022, but increased its total unusual plastic use due to “growth of plastic packaging”.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
McBee said absolute reduction targets would be ideal, but that intensity targets could give growing businesses more flexibility. It’s a position perhaps informed by As You Sow’s status as both a shareholder and an advocate. The organization buys shares in large companies and also uses them as leverage to negotiate directly with managers or to submit decisions on environmental practices. As an advocacy group, As You Sow wants companies to adopt the most robust environmental policies; as a shareholder, McBee said As You Sow is “financially invested in the success of these companies.”
Valliant, with Beyond Plastics, pushed back on the idea of plastic intensity targets, calling for “a solution that brings no more plastic into our lives and the planet and our bodies.”
“At the end of the day,” she told Grist, “we need less plastic overall.”
Either way, both McBee and Valliant agreed that companies need to invest more reusable packaging and packaging-free product formats — for example, concentrated soap tablets that do not need to come in a plastic bottle. Valliant said the need to prioritize reusable over recycled packaging is particularly urgent given research that suggests that recycling plastic increases its toxicity.
As You Sow’s other recommendations for companies include elimination toxic chemicals of plastic products, phasing out or dramatically reducing the use of flexible and multi-laminate plastic packaging (such as the plastic used in bags of potato chips), and making financial contributions to recycling infrastructure commensurate with the amount of plastic packaging they produce. To incentivize some of these measures, the report suggests that companies align CEO compensation with key metrics for circularity. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, some companies keep Mars and Coca-Cola start doing it.
If the environmental costs of inaction on plastics aren’t compelling enough, perhaps the legal, regulatory and reputational ones are. By failing to act more aggressively, companies can expose themselves to investigations and lawsuits from state attorneys general and to increasingly general prohibition and limitations on entire categories of plastic. In addition, there is the United Nations global plastics treatywhich environmentalists hope will put a limit on the amount of plastic the world produces each year.
Stronger action on plastics could also appease consumers. According to McBee, customers are increasingly linking the “ambiguous” issue of plastic pollution back to individual companies responsible for it. “They go out of their way to support the companies that are making a difference,” she said, “and to facilitate the creation of the world they want to live in.”
