Michael Grover

Companies looking for a win from investors, customers, employees, and the community at large are well-served to get the ball rolling on implementing robust and sound Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) elements into the way they do business. Taking action on your ESG practices is a smart way to not only do good but also do well as ESG provides businesses with benefits across the spectrum of stakeholders.

Consumer goods companies measure their plastic output in really big numbers. Coca-Cola produces 3 million tons of plastic packaging per year. Nestlé packaging accounts for 1.7 million tons of plastic per year. Unilever weighs in at a measly 610,000 tons of plastic.

By now, the post-consumer story of all this plastic packaging is legend. It takes 400 to 500 years for plastic to break down naturally. Effectively, that means that every bit of plastic ever produced still exists today—and will for a long time.

In 2019, the United States released around 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels alone. This is less than half the amount released by China, the world’s biggest offender at nearly 10 billion metric tons. These two countries alone account for over 40% of global emissions of CO2.