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Today, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation released its fifth annual Global Commitment 2023 report, showing that signatories of the commitment will miss their own 2025 targets. The report illustrates how in 2022 Global Commitment signatories failed to bring down virgin plastic use meaningfully, and have not made significant progress to expand reuse systems.

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

“This report illustrates, as it did last year, that companies that are supposed to be leading the way out of the plastic pollution crisis are failing their own targets. The rapidly escalating plastic pollution crisis is poisoning people and the planet, and exacerbating the climate crisis. Collectively, in 2022, signatories only brought virgin plastic use down by a mere 0.1%, a negligible amount, despite their target to reduce virgin plastic by 18% by 2025. At the same time, signatories are failing to create and scale reuse systems. Without safer alternative packaging in place, it will be impossible to reduce plastic packaging use.

Companies should be held responsible for the impacts of their full supply chains. When they pollute Black and Brown communities with the petrochemical production that results from their plastic packaging, they are to blame. When their consumers are put at risk of toxic chemical exposures because of their addiction to cheap fossil fuel-based packaging, the companies doing the selling are to blame. And when oil and gas extraction continues in order to make all that plastic, those same companies are feeding the fires of climate change.

It’s past time for a strong and binding policy to reign in runaway plastic production. Two important policy tools, the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act and the Global Plastics Treaty, would do just that. It’s imperative that members of Congress and the US support robust versions of both the Act and the treaty to turn off the “plastics tap.” 

Moreover, companies that say they want to help solve the plastic problem would send a strong signal that they’re earnest if they come out in support of both the Act and the treaty. The importance of voluntary commitments shouldn’t be ignored, and we can see that plastic use is expanding rapidly among 80% of companies that are not signatories to the Global Commitment. However, voluntary commitments must be paired with strong policies if we’re to stem the toxic plastic pollution crisis.”