Facing the increasingly severe pressure of environmental protection review, American Beverage giants Coca Cola and Pepsi publicly said that they had cut off contact with the Plastics Industry Association (PIA).
A Coca Cola spokesman said: "earlier this year, we withdrew from the organization because the position taken by the organization was not completely consistent with our commitments and objectives."
A spokesman for PepsiCo said that the company initially joined the plastics industry association to understand material innovation, and will now withdraw from the association at the end of the year.
Pia is actually a plastic lobbying group whose main function is to lobby American States on behalf of enterprises to prohibit nationwide plastic bans.
In recent years, a wave of "plastic ban order" has been set off all over the world. In May this year, at the meeting of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 1400 representatives reached an agreement to update the Basel Convention on the control of hazardous wastes after a 12-day tug of war negotiation, and decided to monitor and track the plastic waste transported abroad in the future.
A total of 186 UN member states endorsed the treaty renewal, but none of them was the United States. The reason is that the United States has never ratified the Basel Convention. Nevertheless, when the United States wants to ship plastic waste to other countries, the decision is equally effective.
Rolph Payet, executive secretary of the joint secretariats of UNEP Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions (BRS), said at that time that the agreement was historic and sent a very strong political signal to the rest of the world, that is, the private sector and consumer market should consider what they need to do.
The above two companies are not cases of withdrawing from pia. In 2018, some enterprises withdrew from the organization and said that they had differences with PIA on the plastic bag priority purchase method. The pia committee list shows that Wal Mart, Toyota and Johnson & Johnson are all members of the organization.
According to CNBC, citing the statistics of the environmental protection organization "Greenpeace", Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola and Nestle are the world's largest plastic waste manufacturers, manufacturing a large number of polystyrene for packaging and polyester for containers.
While withdrawing from PIA, the two companies also promised to reduce plastic waste and actively promote the use of recyclable packaging. Coca Cola said that by 2025, all packaging will be recyclable, reusable or compostable. PepsiCo also plans to make all its product packaging recyclable, compostable or biodegradable by 2025.
Plastic waste is becoming a great threat to mankind. According to the data of plastics Europe, the global plastic production was 2 million tons in 1950 and increased to 322 million tons by 2015.
According to the world bank's 2050 list of global solid waste management, in 2016, the world generated 2 billion tons of solid waste, that is, 0.74 kg of waste per person per day.
Since 1988, 87% of plastic waste exported has come from high-income countries, with a total value of US $71 billion. Only 9% of the huge plastic waste is recycled and only 12% is incinerated. Eventually, most of the plastic will be buried on land or into the sea, and the degradation time is as long as 400 years. (reporter Feng Difan also contributed to this article)
