Courtesy Break Free from Plastic

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The more plastic a company makes, the more pollution it creates.

That seemingly obvious, yet previously unproven, point, is the main takeaway from a first-of-its-kind study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Researchers from a dozen universities around the world found that, for every 1 percent increase in the amount of plastic a company uses, there is an associated 1 percent increase in its contribution to global plastic litter.

In other words, if Coca-Cola is producing one-tenth of the world’s plastic, the research predicts that the beverage behemoth is responsible for about a tenth of the identifiable plastic litter on beaches or in parks, rivers, and other ecosystems.

That finding “shook me up a lot, I was really distraught,” said Win Cowger, a researcher at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research and the study’s lead author. It suggests that companies’ loudly proclaimed efforts to reduce their plastic footprint “aren’t doing much at all” and that more is needed to make them scale down the amount of plastic they produce.

Significantly, it supports calls from delegates to the United Nations global plastics treaty—which is undergoing its fourth round of discussions in Ottawa, Canada, through Tuesday—to restrict production as a primary means to “end plastic pollution.”

“What the data is saying is that if the status quo doesn’t change in a huge way—if social norms around the rapid consumption and production of new materials don’t change—we won’t see what we want,” Cowger told Grist.

That plastic production should be correlated........

© Mother Jones