Production

In 2022, The Big Plastic Count was the biggest investigation into UK household plastic waste. It showed that almost 100 billion pieces of plastic are thrown away in the UK each year, with hardly any of it recycled. With your help, we’ll gather more, game-changing evidence that will push the government to take bold action on plastic.

This report critically examines the European Commission’s JRC study on plastic recycling technologies, exposing major methodological flaws that favour chemical recycling. It challenges the credibility of industry-backed data and highlights the true environmental costs of solvent- and pyrolysis-based methods. It also provides clear recommendations for policymakers.

The report looks into the sachet economy in the Philippines that continues to add to and worsen the growing plastics pollution problem, showing how the big businesses corrupted Filipino’s tingi culture. It explores the public attitude towards plastic pollution and presents new findings and recommendations for companies and policymakers.

In response to the plastic crisis, consumer goods companies and the petrochemical industry have supported and promoted countless miraculous-sounding technologies, pushing back on their bad reputations as major plastic polluters. CreaSolv3, Unilever Indonesia's hailed flagship project on this front, spectacularly failed and was secretly shuttered two years later.

This report examines how major European retail banks talk about plastics and whether they consider plastic pollution risk as part of their lending criteria. The research suggests that most of the 30 largest European retail banks have minimal or nonexistent policies specifically addressing (mitigating) plastic use, management, and reduction in their investment decisions.

A new investigation exposes the toxic supply chain fueling global plastic production, shedding new light on the critical players driving the plastics and climate crises. The findings were used to build the Fracked Plastics Map, an interactive tool that traces the connections between more than 25 major consumer brands and petrochemicals sourced from fracking.

A new investigation exposes the toxic supply chain fueling global plastic production, shedding new light on the critical players driving the plastics and climate crises. The findings were used to build the Fracked Plastics Map, an interactive tool that traces the connections between more than 25 major consumer brands and petrochemicals sourced from fracking.

The notion of Plastic Age implies that a material and its materiality with all its relations it engages enables a new way of living. Plastics materialize through practices and technological configurations, are symbolically loaded, and enable new economic, technological, natural, and societal relations all atonce.

The absence of a consistent legal framework on end-of-waste for certain waste streams creates uncertainty for waste operators and for entities trading and using secondary raw materials. The implementation of EU-wide end-of-waste criteria can address these disparities in the value chain, ultimately increasing the uptake of high-quality secondary raw materials in manufacturing processes.

This report looks behind the scenes of corporate strategies to keep on polluting and urges companies to deplastify now. Thisrequires transitioning from plastics (particularly linear / singleuse plastics) to sustainable alternative materials and systems ofconsumption, such as reuse and refill.