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Title: Five Firms in Plastic Pollution Alliance 'Made 1,000 Times More
Plastic Than They Cleaned Up'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/20/1344...

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic
pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the
waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by
Greenpeace. The Guardian:The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up
in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell,
TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world's biggest producers of
plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the
environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and
recycling, and creating a circular economy. Documents from a PR company that
were obtained by Greenpeace's Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian
suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to "change the conversation" away from
"simplistic bans of plastic" which were being proposed across the world in
2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers
and harming public health. Early last year the alliance target of clearing
15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as "just too ambitious." The
new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics
output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the
AEPW's chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies,
and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and
Phillips 66. The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes
of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five
years -- more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste
plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The
waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the
use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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