The world is looking to rein in single-use plastic. Will corporations in Bangladesh pay heed?
Author: Kamrun Naher
According to ESDO (Environment and Social Development Organisation) in Bangladesh, every year, about 87,000 tonnes of single-use plastic are thrown away. The majority of this plastic is produced by the packaging industry and consumer products. Recently, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), a borderless global organisation published its Global Brand Audit Report, where Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Nestlé came in as the world's top plastic polluters for five years running. In Bangladesh, the pollution is dominated mainly by The CocaCola Company, Pran-RFL Group, PepsiCo, Pax Group, Akij Food and Beverage Limited and Unilever. Activists around the world are now calling for a Global Plastics Treaty that can provide legally-binding mechanisms and enforcement policies to effectively reduce the amount of plastic both produced and used by corporations. The BFFP movement unites over 2,700 organisations worldwide and 157,415 volunteers in 52 countries, who conducted 721 brand audits. These volunteers collected 763,004 pieces of plastic waste from their own respective countries. The 2022 Brand Audit analysed five years' worth of citizen science trash-collection data, exposing how corporate voluntary commitments are not effectively reducing these companies' devastating environmental impact.