The Climate Emergency Unpacked. A report designed for Greenpeace Plastics

Designed for Greenpeace International and called ‘The Climate Emergency Unpacked’. The report sets out the issues with expanding the production of single-use plastics, featuring infographics explaining the plastics production process, flow-diagrams showing connections between Big Oil and FMCG firms, and geo-spatial maps locating and illustrating the scale of expansion happening right now in this climate-changing industry. The report was published in September 2021 in eight languages.

About the content of the report…

Drivers and car makers the world over are going electric which has caused the Fossil Fuel industry a real headache - where and how to maintain profits by using all that Oil and Gas they have access to? Enter the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry.

Big Oil - firms you’ve probably heard of like Dow, Exxon, Shell and Ineos, and lesser known firms such as Formosa and Braskem - have developed strong relationships with the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry (Coke, Pespico, Nestle…), vastly expanding their capacity to produce single-use food and drinks packaging.

The two industries are using recycling as a smokescreen because it looks like a valid solution, unless you know that plastic production and recycling processes are emission intensive and will make the Climate Emergency worse - for every 1 tonne of plastic produced, 5 tonnes of climate changing C02 are released into the atmosphere. And only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, so the idea that Oil and FMCG firms are going to increase plastic production and somehow recycle it all is nonsense.

There are solutions to the Climate Emergency, creating millions of tonnes of plastic, recycled or new, isn’t one of them.