The Global Brand Audit Report 2018 was published by Break Free From Plastic, a global movement group, aiming to search for the world’s top corporate plastic polluters.
With regards to the research preparation, nearly 10,000 volunteers from 42 countries on 6 continents were recruited for carrying out a nine-month plastic cleanup project in 239 different locations around the world, such as outdoor coastal, shoreline, and urban areas. In the cleanup events, volunteers were required to count and record the brand, parent manufacturer, product type, and packaging type of every piece of waste collected.
As a result, a total of 187,851 disposable plastic wastes produced by more than 1,000 brands were collected, and Coca-Cola was found to be on the top of the polluters list as wastes identified to be products of Coca-Cola appeared in 40 out of 42 countries during the cleanup operations. Apart from Coca-Cola, some of the top 10 multinational brands on this years’ polluters list which are familiar to Hong Kong people are PepsiCo, Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive.
The significance of this audit report is not only to gather volunteers to clean up beaches across the globe, but also to focus on the issue of corporate responsibility and to put blame on big companies and producers who use large amount of plastics in product packaging. Despite the fact that many individuals should be accounted for the disposal of plastic waste, they have nothing to do with the design and production of the use of plastic packaging, whereas the culprits should be the corporations. It is suggested that big companies and producers should at least implement non-toxic systems in the production, recycling and reuse of plastic packaging, so as to reduce environmental impacts, such as air, land and water pollutions.
In order to keep the public attention on this issue and to continuously hold corporations accountable, individuals and organisations are encouraged to keep up the efforts in cleaning up plastic packaging in their own countries and reporting the data to various green groups or even on social media.
Source: https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/globalbrandauditreport2018/
