23. July 2024

The Geneva Environment Network | Road to Busan: Global Producer Responsibility for Plastic Pollution

The Geneva Environment Network is inviting you to the event “Road to Busan | Global Producer Responsibility for Plastic Pollution”! This event, organised within the framework of the Geneva Beat Plastic Pollution Dialogues, will present and discuss a research paper highlighting how brand names can be used to hold plastic companies accountable for items found polluting the environment out of an NGO perspective.

  • Date: 23 July 2024
  • Time: 4PM – 5:30PM CEST
  • Location: Online | Webex – get the link to the event below!

This event will discuss the findings of a research that has used data from a 5-year (2018–2022) worldwide (84 countries) program to identify brands found on plastic items in the environment through 1576 audit events.

The authors found that 50% of items were unbranded, calling for mandated producer reporting. The top five brands accounted for 24% of the total branded count, and 56 companies accounted for more than 50%. There was a clear and strong log-log linear relationship production (%) = pollution (%) between companies’ annual production of plastic and their branded plastic pollution, with food and beverage companies being disproportionately large polluters. Phasing out single-use and short-lived plastic products by the largest polluters would greatly reduce global plastic pollution.

Leading experts speaking at this event will present the results of the research “Global producer responsibility for plastic pollution” published in Science Advances and discuss how the findings can help the development of the legally binding treaty that member states are currently developing, ahead of the next round of negotiation that will take place in the Republic of Korea, from 25 November to 1st December 2024.