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Today, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation released its fourth annual Global Commitment 2022 report, demonstrating that companies comprising 20% of the world’s producers of plastic packaging will miss their own 2025 targets for a circular economy. The report shows an overall increase in virgin plastic use by signatories in 2021 and a decrease in reusable plastic packaging.

In response, Defend Our Health’s Senior Market Campaigner, Maya Rommwatt, said: 

“This progress report illustrates the abject failure by the biggest multinational corporations that love to broadcast their support of a circular plastics economy as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Dangerous toxic plastic pollutes our bodies and the planet and is a crisis manufactured entirely by fast moving consumer goods companies in cahoots with Big Oil. Instead of working to meet their own voluntary targets, The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and others actually increased the use of virgin petrochemical plastic in 2021 and decreased the reuse capacity of their packaging.

Toxic plastic pollution is a public health crisis in the making, inundating the most vulnerable among us from the fenceline residents forced to breathe the air contaminated by the dangerous pollution that results from plastic production, to consumers and children exposed to products that all seem to be packaged in needless layers of toxic plastic. Over and over again we see that the people most exposed are communities of color and low-income communities at both ends of the supply chain.

Voluntary corporate commitments are clearly not enough to reverse the racist toxic plastic pollution wave that is upon us. Companies must be held to account by a global plastics treaty and powerful state laws that would provide a backstop to the runaway use of cheap plastic made from oil and gas. We have barely begun to understand the dangerous health impacts of plastics, but it is already clear that petrochemical plastic is killing us.”