Amid a flood of plastic, big companies try to clean up image

LONDON » Once a month, accountant Michael Byrne pulls on his rubber boots and makes his way to a spot on the banks of the River Thames.

He carefully marks out a onesquare meter (11-square foot) patch and, with gloved hands, catalogues each bit of plastic he finds, meticulously reporting the data to the environmental group Thames21. On Aug. 20, for example, he and other volunteers found an average of 31 food wrappers, the sticks from 29 cotton swabs, 12 bottle tops and about 100 pieces of small chewed up plastic in each patch.

“We are the data gatherers” who provide evidence of the plastic that’s clogging the world’s rivers and oceans, he said. “We are building up a picture all along

the river of what is washing up.”

Public awareness of the problem of plastic waste is swelling after alarming forecasts that there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. Plus the shocking images are rolling in: Britain’s Sky News’ campaign against ocean plastic featuring whales bloated by plastic bags; National Geographic’s chilling picture of a seahorse curled around a pink cotton swab, and filmmaker David Attenborough’s documentary “Blue Planet II” footage of sea turtles shrouded in plastic.

Andwhere consumers’ attention goes, so does that of companies.

In the last few months, Amcor, Ecover, Evian, L’Oréal, Mars, M&S, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Walmart and Werner & Mertz— which together use more than 6 million metric tons of plastic packaging per year — have committed to using only reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an innovation think- tank.

Adidas, meanwhile, is making a line of clothing fromrecycled plastic bottles and promoting the products with an online video underscoring the health threat to humans of ingesting plastic particles found in fish. Negozio Leggero, a high-end food store in Italy and Switzerland, features 1,500 package-free products. British supermarket chain Iceland is planning to remove all plastic packaging from its ownbrand products by 2023.

“Some of the companies that might have been seen as the worst offenders are the ones moving forward,” said Abigail Entwistle of Fauna& Flora International, a 115-year-old conservation organization. “They have the most to lose.”

These are the companies, after all, that have profited from a business model that wraps everything from spring water to cleaning products in plastic packaging that is used once and thrown away.

Global plastic production increased to 380 million metric tons (418 million tons) in 2015 from 2 million metric tons in 1950, according to research by RolandGeyer, a professor of industrial ecology at the Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara.

About 60 percent of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced throughout history has ended up as waste, with more than three-fourths of that going into landfills or the natural environment, Geyer estimates. In 2010 alone, between 4 million and 12 million metric tons of plastic entered the marine environment.

The material kills and maims wildlife and makes its way into the food chain.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlighted the issue last year in a re- port that said the weight of plastic in the oceans would equal that of fish by 2050 if current trends continue. Only 14 percent of plastic packaging is currently collected for recycling, according to the foundation, which works with companies like Google, Nike and Danone. Action is needed on multiple fronts, it says.

“It’s not about one innovation, one regulation, one action. We need all of them at the same time.” Rob Opsomer, who leads the foundation’s New Plastics Economy project. “We need to have more and bolder ambitions.”