Plastic pollution, a by-product of fundamental flaws in an essentially linear plastic system, is amajor environmental challenge, time we yet a coherent global strategy to solve this growing crisis remains elusive. This is high demand greater corporate accountability for the plastic pollution crisis that plagues our planet. Brand audits are one tangible tool to push corporations and policy makers towards building better systems for a plastic-free future. Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) brand audit is a citizen action initiative. This initiative involves counting and documenting the brands found on plastic waste collected at a cleanup to identify the companies responsible for plastic pollution. By collecting data on plastic waste, we challenge the industry narrative about who is responsible for the plastic crisis and how to solve it. Brand audits enable us to shift the focus back to the companies that are responsible for creating the problem in the first place, and empower us to demand that they stop producing unnecessary throwaway single-use plastics.

This brand audit report holds the top polluting companies accountable for fueling the plastic pollution crisis in Bangladesh. We found around 131.6298 kg of plastic waste in the Bepin park area surrounded by Brahmaputra River located in the Mymensingh District and Dhanmondi Lake area and surrounding communities in Dhaka District area which we audited for plastic waste. The selected area of Dhaka was audited for 3 days and approximately each day consist of 4 hours of working with the aid of 50 volunteers. The sites in Mymensingh were audited for 3 days with 6 hours of working/day. 55 volunteers were trained up for this initiative. This list of waste is prominently dominated by The Coca-Cola Company (41.82332 kg), closely followed by Pran-RFL Group (23.94311kg), then PepsiCo (16.16016 kg), and some other local and multinational company like Akij food & Beverage Ltd (6.02304 kg), Partex Group (6.70646 kg), Unilever (5.189kg), Meghna Group (3.47657 kg), Quaseem Food Products Limited (2.8409kg), and Bombay Sweets Limited (2.7141 kg) etc. Among the collected waste we found 78.04642 kg of recyclable waste & 52.0526 kgs of non-recyclable waste which clearly underlines the fact that recycling can not be the solution of plastic pollution crisis.

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