Today’s Solutions: April 26, 2024

There are lots of ways you can voice your disapproval of a company’s wasteful ways. You can write the company letters, lament them on social media, boycott their products—or you can put a 15-foot-tall monster made out of garbage in front of their headquarters. That’s exactly what Greenpeace activists did on Tuesday in front of the Nestlé US headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Earlier in the day, an even bigger artfully crafted trash monster was delivered to the company’s global headquarters in Switzerland, while similar leviathans cropped up in Italy, Kenya, and the Philippines. It was all part of a global day of action to raise awareness of Nestlé’s contributions to the estimated 8 million tons of plastic entering our oceans each year. In recent months, Nestlé has come under fire for what advocates say is an outsized contribution to the plastic crisis. A 2018 audit conducted by a constellation of groups under the banner Break Free From Plastic found Nestlé products to be the third most often-recovered pieces of ocean trash. Facing mounting pressure, the company has taken some positive steps, including saying it’ll phase out “non recyclable or hard to recycle” plastics by 2025, beginning with plastic straws this year, and introduce more reusable packaging. Still, many environmentalists consider these pledges to be wholly inadequate, which helps to explain why giant trash monsters are appearing in front of Nestlé’s doors.

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