Big 5 Producers of Single-Use Plastic Waste in 10 countries - April 2023

This is the second article about new Data Visualizations, you can see the previous article here.

Above we present a graphical view of the top 5 #SingleUsePlastic waste producers from the FMCG sector in each of the countries we sample for our monthly data report.

What this shows is that, only a handful of companies in each country need to take serious action on reducing, reusing and recycling the plastic they produce, to make a big impact on the plastic waste problem in that country. In more formal terms, if these companies were to incorporate in their sale price, the full environmental externalities of the post-consumer life of the packaging they produce, this would:

• ?make the producer, and through them the final consumer, responsible for the real cost of this packaging - rather than passing this cost on to society at large, as at present
• ?incentivize the producer to reimagine the product delivery mechanism and its associated packaging in order to reduce its costly environmental impacts
• ?finance the domestic recycling and waste collection industry to recover and reprocess a share close to 100% of this packaging
• ?reduce the gap between the final price to the consumer of reusable/refillable packaging and disposable/single-use packaging

The table below shows the specific companies occupying the top 5, for each country.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

We’ve collected and analysed data for over two years with the Wastebase app (since March 2021).

We’ve noticed that in every country, a handful of large producers contribute massively to the single use plastic waste detected - between 40 and 80% of the overall total. There appears to be a rough correlation between decreasing wealth (as measured by a country's GDP-per-capita) and increased pollution share of the big 5 producers in that country - however further research would be required to make any firm statement about this.

These large producers are a mix of global companies (such as Cocacola Now ), regional companies (such as Bakhresa Group ) and national companies (such as Highlands Drinks Limited ).?Although the global companies are orders of magnitude larger than the national companies (in terms of annual revenue and capitalization), it is important to understand that even the national companies in the "big 5" are large, mature businesses.?This means that they have the capacity to undertake strategic initiatives to rethink and restructure their business operations.

Typically, the global and regional producers reach the top 5 in waste production across multiple countries - although the specific position within that ranking, varies from country to country.

METHODOLOGY

How do we create the big 5 bar chart?

1. We take the number of waste items produced by the producer, detected in each country, up to the end of April 2023. ( You can download this data in consolidated format from our Kaggle page, or drill down into it on our Data Portal wastebase.org ... detailed instructions are here.)

2. We divide this by the total number of waste items detected in each country, up to the end of April 2023 to get the % contribution

3. We find the 5 companies in each country which have the highest % contribution, and show these on the X-axis

4. Finally we order the countries on the Y-axis by GDP-per-capita (Purchasing Power Parity), as published by the World Bank here.