During a four-month expedition tracking plastic pollution around South America and the length of the Amazon, I (literally) recorded samples of rubbish every 100km, dived into dangerous rubbish dumps, located landfill sites and surveyed source-to-sea debris – so I have seen first-hand where the responsibility lies.

I expected to find a lot of plastic on my journey, but I am still deeply shocked by the sheer ubiquity of plastic pollution from global brands, even in the most remote places.

Clearly visible in this tsunami of disposable plastic were logos of multinational consumer brands. Along with many others, plastic waste from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé (two of the world’s top-three plastic polluters) turned up in our samples virtually everywhere.

• Coca-Cola was the number one producer polluter – accounting for 32% alone, more than double the amount of the next four top polluters put together.
• Plastic drinks bottles accounted for more than 25% of overall samples.
• The Top Five Global Plastic Polluters – Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Arcor Grupo and Mondelez International – accounted for 45% of all branded items collected.

These brands – with their throwaway products and packaging – are responsible for promoting and perpetuating our modern throwaway culture. They are driving mass production and overconsumption across the world, which in turn is overwhelming our planet with pointless plastic pollution.

"The raw truth is that these fossil-fuel-plastic corporations continue to deliberately compromise the health of all ecosystems and undermine living conditions for all life on Earth. It is a conscious calculated problem of their making that urgently requires an urgent global response.”

A staggering 91% of the plastic waste ever discarded has either been incinerated, openly burnt, ended up in landfills, dumps, the oceans or the natural environment. Only 9% has been recycled globally. [1]

The time has come to place the responsibility where it truly lies – with the multinational corporations and plastics producers. One solution is to call for a tax on single-use plastic producers and demand that they cut the amount they produce and sell by half by 2025 – without passing the cost on to the consumer.

The tax collected should be ring-fenced for investment in waste clean-up, safe waste management and wastewater systems and clean water infrastructure projects, and technical assistance at home and abroad

Please sign and share our #TaxPlasticPolluters petition to show your support to help stop fossil-fuel-plastic pollution at source. There is no time to waste.

The actions I’m urging government/multinational corporations to take:

• Establish Ecocide policies, action plans and targets
• Ban and phase-out all single-use plastics by 2025
• Introduce a full Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) tax on virgin and single-use plastic by 2022
• Make it compulsory for companies to disclose their fossil-fuel-plastic footprint, including their greenhouse gas and water footprint by 2022
• Demand that companies reduce that amount by at least half, country by country, by 2025

[1] Geyer R et al (2017) ‘Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made’, Science Advances 3 (7). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782