The Minderoo Foundation, working with Wood Mackenzie, SYSTEMIQ and the Carbon Trust, traced single-use plastic back through the supply chain to the companies that make the raw polymers.
The world generated 139 million tonnes of single-use plastic waste in 2021, up from 133 million tonnes in 2019. Just a few petrochemical companies dominate: ExxonMobil (6.0 million tonnes), Sinopec (5.8 million tonnes) and Dow (5.3 million tonnes) topped the list of single-use polymer producers. The lifecycle greenhouse-gas footprint of single-use plastics was about 450 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, measured as the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that would have the same warming effect, roughly the UK's total annual emissions.
The index matters because it shifts attention from consumers and brands to the upstream producers whose output decides how much single-use plastic exists.
It is a report by the Minderoo Foundation, an Australian philanthropic organisation set up by Andrew and Nicola Forrest in 2001, built on commercial market data; the company-level attributions are estimates. The original link on Minderoo's website no longer works.
Download the Plastic Waste Makers Index 2023 (PDF, 16.7 MB, archived copy): web.archive.org/web/20241227024927/https://cdn.minderoo.org/content/uploads/2023/02/04205527/Plastic-Waste-Makers-Index-2023.pdf . © Minderoo Foundation, 2023.