Plastic Pollution

“The unprecedented plastic waste tide plaguing our oceans and shores, can become as limited as our chosen relationship with plastics, which involves a dramatic behavioral change on our part…” — Claire Le Guern

March 9, 2024

Plastic Grip (by Michael Kowalczyk, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Under pressure from activist investors, big brands agree to report and reduce plastics use – Grist Magazine

Excerpt:
Shareholder advocacy groups have already won plastics-related concessions from companies including Disney, Hormel, and Choice Hotels…Globally, two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic enter the ocean every minute, and plastics and petrochemical companies are planning to make even more of the material over the coming decades…

Wealthy investors and asset managers wield a lot of power over the major companies whose stock they own or control. Every year, shareholder advocacy groups hope to exert that power for good by filing shareholder resolutions — 500-word proposals that might ask companies to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, or to disclose more information on their resource use. 

Shareholders typically vote on resolutions between April and June during a period known as “proxy season,” named after the proxy statements that companies distribute to investors ahead of their annual shareholder meetings. These votes aren’t binding, but they can influence companies’ decisions and generate press around a particular issue.

This year, activist investors are notching wins even before the beginning of proxy season. Shareholder advocacy groups have already extracted a handful of plastics-related concessions from major companies — including the entertainment behemoth Disney, the food processing giant Hormel, and Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in the world. The companies’ new commitments include reporting on and reducing the amount of plastics they use in their packaging, as well as more closely monitoring hazardous plastic additives.

Activist investment firms like Green Century Capital Management — which manages over $1 billion in assets — must make a business case for environmental action. Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate at Green Century Capital Management who helped negotiate the agreements with Disney and Choice Hotels, said the new commitments show that companies are waking up to the threat that single-use plastics pose to their bottom line. Between the prospect of more stringent state regulations, new lawsuits against plastic producers, and a global plastics treaty being negotiated by the United Nations, plastics are facing some potentially severe regulatory and reputational prospects over the coming years.

“It’s unnerving investors,” Guernsey said, and the scale of the problem is “just starting to dawn on corporate managers…”

More on Plastic Pollution . . .

Microplastics with a diameter of 0.5 μm (small green spheres) penetrating the cytoplasm of MH-22a hepatocyte cells. (by Karimov Denis and Valova Iana, captured by ZEISS Axio Imager 2, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia).https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microplastics_that_have_penetrated_inside_cells.png

Nanoplastics linked to heart attack, stroke and early death, study finds – CNN

People with microplastics or nanoplastics in their carotid artery tissues were twice as likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from any cause over the next three years than people who had none, a new study found…“To date, our study is the first that associated the plastic contamination with human diseases,” said Raffaele Marfella, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine…

Florida Sea Grant agent Maia McGuire sampling for microplastics in a freshwater stream and microplastics, July 21st, 2017 (courtesy of Florida Sea Grant CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Microplastics found in every human placenta tested in study – the Guardian

Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries…The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels…

A bale of crushed PET drink bottles at a recycling facility in San Jose, California., May 26, 2019 (by Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia).

Reduce, reuse, redirect outrage: How plastic makers used recycling as a fig leaf – NPR

Former industry officials have said the goal was to avoid regulations and ensure that demand for plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, kept growing. Despite years of recycling campaigns, less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally, and the amount of plastic waste that’s dumped in the environment continues to soar..

Plastic Bags (by wastebusters CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

California’s war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired. Lawmakers are trying again – the Los Angeles Times

According to a report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, 157,385 tons of plastic bag waste was discarded in California the year the law was passed. By 2022, however, the tonnage of discarded plastic bags had skyrocketed to 231,072 — a 47% jump…The problem, it turns out, was a section of the law that allowed grocery stores and large retailers to provide thicker, heavier-weight plastic bags to customers for the price of a dime….

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