Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is in the number five slot. The huge company owns a variety of personal care and cleaning brands like Downy, Tide, Tampax, Crest, Charmin, and Gillette. Volunteers found nearly 2,000 pieces of plastic from 30 countries tied to Proctor & Gamble brands.
Companies like Procter & Gamble have a history of lobbying to keep polluting corporations free from blame for plastic waste. Procter & Gamble was involved with a trade group known as the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, which pushed hard to promote recycling at the consumer level—an idea the industry knew wouldn’t work at the scale needed—in order to deflect criticism away from the businesses producing plastic trash. The company was involved in meetings with other polluters like Exxon, Chevron, and Dow Chemical, where they all discussed how to use recycling to keep plastic’s image clean.
