The Blueprint for Credible Action on Plastic Pollution: Harmonized Metrics

Understanding the Scale of Plastic Pollution

By now, most people are aware that plastic pollution has become a crisis, devastating ecosystems and communities around the globe. That’s because the evidence is all around us in plain view – littering roadsides, overflowing from trash cans, and washing up on beaches. However, while we may know that plastic pollution is pervasive, it is hard to fully comprehend the monumental scale of the problem when so much more of it is out of our sight, from the plastic waste we export to developing countries to the plastic floating in remote parts of the ocean or breaking down into microplastics.

If you don’t understand the scale of a problem, how can you effectively take steps to address it? How can you know what is working and what is not? That’s where data collection comes in.

And more specifically, the need to make sure that the data we are using to understand plastic pollution are harmonized across companies, industries, and even countries – otherwise we will never fully comprehend what we are up against or what solutions are most impactful.

The Need for Harmonized Measurement

A growing number of investors, financial institutions, policy makers, and other stakeholders are interested in understanding the state of the plastic waste crisis. This increased interest from stakeholders is putting pressure on companies to measure and report publicly on their plastic footprints. In response, WWF’s Blueprint for Credible Action on Plastic Pollution outlines why plastic footprint reporting is an important early step for companies – benefits can include:

• Building trust with stakeholders through transparent reporting.
• Demonstrating authenticity and accountability in companies’ efforts by tracking and disclosing their plastic use and progress annually.
• Opening the lines of communication between companies to discuss challenges to and successes in reaching targets openly in industry and multi-stakeholder forums.
• Driving more effective solutions to addressing plastic pollution.

For us to understand and address the full scope of the problem, we need all companies to be reporting on their plastics-related impacts in a standardized and globally comparable format. This means getting plastic integrated into existing environmental and financial disclosure systems. A great example of this is the Scaling Plastics Disclosure initiative. Through a partnership between CDP, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Minderoo Foundation, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and WWF, the Scaling Plastics Disclosure initiative is advancing harmonized measurement through the expansion of CDP’s environmental disclosure platform to include plastic. Leveraging requests from investors with $136 trillion in assets, almost 3,000 companies disclosed their plastic-related impacts through CDP’s questionnaire for the first time in 2023, and over 5,600 disclosed in 2024. Over 20% of reporting companies provided data on plastics in 2024 – a strong sign that companies across sectors and jurisdictions are waking up to the risks posed by plastic waste and pollution. This is a key development as it standardizes what metrics companies are disclosing publicly, such as the total amount of plastic produced, sold, and/or used, the amount of virgin versus recycled content, and the amount that is reusable or recyclable.

This year, for the first time, CDP also asked companies to report on the end-of-life management of the plastic they use or produce. That is, how much of the plastic is actually recycled, landfilled, incinerated, or mismanaged in practice. In the same way that emissions factors help companies calculate and report on how their activities are contributing to climate change, we need data to translate how the amount and types of plastic companies use or produce translate to impacts on the plastic pollution crisis.

Similarly to the need for consistent metrics, for the data to be useful it is also important that companies measure their plastic footprints in the same way and use the same methodologies. WWF developed the ReSource Footprint Tracker in 2019 to help companies estimate the fate of their plastic using the limited data available at the time. Five years later, there is still no consistent, high-quality source of global recycling rates or a widely used and agreed upon methodology for estimating end-of-life management of plastic. This means that how companies disclose on end-of-life management in CDP’s questionnaire, if they decide to at all, is likely to vary considerably.

The absence of common datasets and reporting methodologies hampers comprehensive problem-solving and could equivalate to a comparison of apples to oranges, even among companies in the same industry. WWF plans to continue working to align around a unified database that provides open access to recycling, incineration, landfill, and mismanagement rates globally. The goal should be for all companies disclosing their plastic-related impacts to have access to the data needed to credibly and transparently estimate where their plastic is ending up.

We can’t understand the problem unless we are speaking the same data language, and that’s why harmonized measurement will be critical to understanding, and thus solving, the plastic pollution crisis.

Read more about it in step 3 of the Blueprint report.

The Power of Collective Change

It’s clear we can't have each individual company addressing the plastic crisis within a vacuum. We need collaboration across business that includes solution sharing, transparent data, harmonized metrics, and open communication that ensures it isn't just one company succeeding over another – because in the long run, one successful company isn't going to be enough.

To make meaningful impact, we all must all rise with the tide together in this pre-competitive space and that starts by making sure we are all speaking the same numerical language when it comes to reporting on this issue. Only through global consistency can we identify the best areas for collective action and together take the data-driven steps needed to move the dial on plastic pollution once and for all.

This post is the second in our series on The Blueprint for Credible Action on Plastic Pollution.

Read the first post here: Making a case for larger costs & long-term ROIs