Once a year, a global network of over 12,000 organisations coordinates a simple exercise. Volunteers on six continents go out to beaches, rivers, parks and streets, collect plastic waste, sort it by brand and count what they find. The results are published as the Global Brand Audit by Break Free From Plastic. It has run every year since 2018. Over that period, the same handful of corporate names have appeared at the top of the ranking every single year, in roughly the same positions, regardless of what the sustainability pages of those companies’ annual reports say.

This is a plain-English explainer of what the audit is, who tends to dominate it, why the ranking is so consistent, and what a small independent refillable brand can honestly say about the whole picture from the outside.

What Break Free From Plastic actually is

Break Free From Plastic is a global movement founded in 2016. Membership is around 12,000 organisations across more than 100 countries, ranging from small local coastal-cleanup groups to well-known international environmental NGOs. The movement’s work covers policy advocacy, scientific research, community organising and citizen data collection.

The Global Brand Audit is the movement’s best-known output. It is a citizen-science project rather than a corporate self-reporting exercise. Volunteers do organised waste collections in their own countries, log every branded piece of plastic they find using a shared methodology, and the aggregated results are published each autumn. The methodology has been reviewed by academic partners and refined over the years, but the fundamental question it answers is very simple: whose plastic is actually showing up in the environment?

The consistent top of the ranking

Every published edition of the audit has been dominated by roughly the same small set of companies. Precise rankings shift year to year, but the top five in some order have consistently been:

• The Coca-Cola Company — #1 or top three in every published audit since 2018. Coca-Cola typically accounts for a larger share of collected branded waste than the next two companies combined.
• PepsiCo — consistently in the top three or top five.
• Nestlé — consistently in the top three or top five, with a portfolio spanning bottled water, confectionery and food packaging.
• Unilever — consistently in the top ten, with personal care and food / household portfolios both contributing.
• Procter & Gamble — consistently in the top ten, primarily through personal care and household cleaning brands.

The rest of the top ten in most editions has included Mondelēz, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive, Philip Morris and various regional players depending on the audit’s geographic coverage in a given year.

What is striking about the ranking is how little it moves. The 2019 audit, the 2020 audit, the 2021 audit and every subsequent edition have shown broadly the same names in broadly the same positions. This is despite each of these companies publishing successive multi-year sustainability commitments, funding voluntary industry initiatives, and reporting annually on progress.

Why the list is so consistent

There are three overlapping reasons the audit ranking barely moves.

Environmental presence is a lagging indicator of production. The plastic being collected on a beach in 2026 was, on average, produced years earlier. Any change in production practices today shows up in the audit only slowly, over the years it takes for that plastic to reach the environment.

Production of single-use packaging has kept rising. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and the others have all continued to grow overall unit volume through the period the audit has been running. Even where recycled content per bottle has increased, the absolute number of bottles produced has increased faster. That means more total plastic in circulation, which eventually turns up in the environment.

Sustainability pledges have targeted metrics that do not directly reduce collected waste. Most corporate plastic pledges are framed around recycled content, recyclability, or long-horizon recycling collection targets. None of those directly reduce the number of single-use units entering the environment through the informal-waste channels the audit captures. Recycled bottles still fragment. Recyclable bottles still get littered.

This is not a story about bad individual people at those companies. Corporate sustainability teams are, in most cases, working hard on genuinely difficult problems. The structural issue is that the audit measures unit presence in the environment, and corporate pledges typically do not target unit reduction. Two different questions, two different scoreboards.

How UK personal care sits in the picture

The personal care category is not the largest contributor to the audit’s top-line ranking — beverage packaging (bottles, cans, wrappers) accounts for a larger share by volume. But it is meaningfully present, and it is the category most relevant to what Lifelong exists to change.

Unilever’s presence in the top ten is partly driven by household and personal-care packaging: Dove, Persil, Domestos, Wild deodorant (acquired in 2023), Dollar Shave Club, and a wide range of shampoo, body wash and cosmetic brands. Procter & Gamble’s presence is partly driven by Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Old Spice, Secret, Gillette, Native (acquired in 2017) and household cleaning brands. Both companies operate the classic pattern — a small refill-format sub-brand acquired to sit inside a portfolio still overwhelmingly powered by single-use units.

In the UK specifically, the situation is compounded by the low actual recycling rate for personal care and cosmetics packaging — typically in the low single digits according to WRAP and academic studies — which means the vast majority of what these brands ship into UK households eventually contributes to the same environmental plastic story the audit is counting.

What the audit does not measure

Worth being honest about the scoreboard’s edges. The Global Brand Audit measures branded plastic collected from cleanup events in participating countries. That means:

• It undercounts plastic that has already fragmented into microplastic (too small to identify by brand).
• It undercounts plastic in landfill (not accessible for citizen cleanup).
• It undercounts plastic in the deep ocean (physically inaccessible).
• It undercounts categories that lack branding — fishing gear, tyre wear, textile fibres — even though these are meaningful sources of the overall plastic pollution problem.
• Coverage is stronger in some regions than others depending on volunteer network density.

None of that undermines the audit’s core finding. If anything, it means the top-ten polluters’ real environmental footprint is worse than the audit shows — because the categories that are undercounted (fragmented plastic, landfill, deep-ocean) all trace back over decades to the same corporate production.

A founder note on what a small brand can honestly say about this

I have spent the last five years building Lifelong Deo. The whole reason the brand exists is to lower the amount of single-use plastic that goes into the personal care aisle every year. On the scale of the audit findings above, a small independent brand does not fix the corporate plastic pollution problem. Coca-Cola alone accounts for more collected plastic in a single year than the entire output of every small independent refillable personal care brand combined.

What a small brand can do, honestly, is three things. One, prove the alternative works at product level so it stops being theoretical. Two, keep making it at a price point that means real people can actually buy it, not just as a boutique gesture. Three, stay independent long enough that the refill message does not get quietly rewritten by an acquiring parent whose profit model runs the other way.

The refill format is the concrete answer. The applicator stays on your shelf for years and is replaced only if it physically fails, in which case we replace it for free. Only the plant-based active refill is replaced, and the refill packaging is a fully compostable pouch instead of a plastic tube. Every refill sold is a plastic tube that never had to be produced, transported, sold, or eventually fragmented into microplastic.

Lifelong Luxe is our anodised aluminium applicator, engineered to last a lifetime, backed with a no-questions-asked replacement guarantee. Lifelong Vibes is the accessible version made from ocean-bound recycled plastic in partnership with TIDE. Both take the same plant-based refills, which arrive in a fully compostable pouch. Small numbers on the scale of the top-ten audit ranking. But every one of those refills is a plastic unit that the audit will not need to count in twenty years’ time.

What actually shifts the ranking

Given how consistent the top of the audit has been for eight years running, the honest question is what would actually move it. Three things do the work at scale:

Policy that caps production, not just improves recycling. The UN Plastic Treaty negotiations are the most credible international vehicle. Industry lobbying has slowed progress on production caps in particular. Where implemented, extended-producer-responsibility schemes at national level are also meaningfully changing the calculus.

Format shift, not just material shift. Recycled content in a single-use bottle is better than virgin content in a single-use bottle. Refillable formats are better still, because they take units out of the system entirely. The multinational majors are unlikely to lead this shift because it directly reduces unit volume. Independent brands and refill-station concepts are where the format shift is actually happening.

Consumer decisions in aggregate. No single shopper moves the audit. But if refillable personal care goes from a 1% category to a 10% category over the next decade, that starts to show up on the volume side of the corporate P&L, and the pledges follow the numbers.

Where to read the audits

The Break Free From Plastic Global Brand Audit is publicly available and free to read. Each annual edition includes the ranked list, methodology notes, regional breakdowns and case studies. The movement also publishes ongoing investigative reporting, corporate accountability tracking and policy analysis at breakfreefromplastic.org.

The ChangingMarkets Foundation publishes complementary investigative reports on greenwashing across the plastics, fashion and personal care industries. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation publishes annual Global Commitment progress reports on the corporate pledges themselves. Reading all three side by side gives the most complete picture of the promise-versus-delivery gap in the corporate plastic story.

The honest summary

Every year, a citizen-science audit run by 12,000 organisations across 100 countries produces the same top-ten list of corporate plastic polluters. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Unilever, P&G, Mars and a handful of others show up in the same top positions year after year, despite each publishing successive sustainability pledges over the same period. The ranking is consistent because it measures unit presence in the environment, and corporate pledges typically do not target unit reduction.

Fixing this at scale requires policy that caps production, format shift toward refillable, and consumer aggregate movement. A small independent brand does not move the ranking on its own. What it can do is prove the refill format works, keep making it, and stay independent long enough that the message does not get quietly rewritten. That is the case Lifelong has been building for five years, and the case it will keep building for as long as it takes.

Further reading

• What Big Beauty Promised By 2025 — And What They Actually Delivered — the corporate pledges piece from this pillar.
• Wild Deodorant Sold To Unilever: What It Really Means For Sustainable Shoppers — the specific personal-care acquisition story.
• Microplastics In The Ocean UK Explained: What The 2026 Research Actually Shows — the current science on where all this plastic ends up.
• The Lifelong Deo blog — more honest guides on natural personal care, plastic waste and independent beauty brands.

Frequently asked questions

Who tops the Break Free From Plastic audit?

Coca-Cola has been at the top or in the top three of every published edition since 2018. PepsiCo and Nestlé have consistently followed in the top five. Unilever and Procter & Gamble have consistently appeared in the top ten. The specific positions shift slightly year to year; the top-five names have been extremely stable across the audit’s eight-year history.

Why does the ranking barely move despite sustainability pledges?

Because the audit measures unit presence in the environment, and corporate sustainability pledges typically target recycled content, recyclability, or long-horizon collection targets — none of which directly reduce the number of single-use units entering informal waste streams. Additionally, environmental presence is a lagging indicator of production, and production has continued to rise.

Is personal care packaging a big part of the audit?

Beverage packaging accounts for a larger share of the audit’s top-line count by volume than personal care does. However, personal care is meaningfully present, particularly through Unilever, P&G and their subsidiary brands. In the UK, low actual recycling rates for cosmetics packaging (in the low single digits) mean personal care is a growing category concern.

What does the audit not capture?

Plastic that has already fragmented into microplastic (too small to identify by brand), plastic in landfill (not accessible for citizen cleanup), plastic in the deep ocean, and unbranded categories such as fishing gear, tyre wear and textile fibres. These are all meaningful sources of overall plastic pollution and are not reflected in the audit’s ranking.

What actually shifts the ranking?

Policy that caps production (rather than just improving recycling), format shift toward refillable systems (rather than just switching materials), and aggregate consumer movement toward refill-format categories. The multinational majors are unlikely to lead the format shift because it reduces their unit volume. Independent refill brands and refill-station concepts are where the format shift is actually happening.

How does Lifelong fit into the audit picture?

Lifelong is far too small to appear in the audit, in either direction. What it can do is prove the refill format works at product level, ship the alternative at a price real people can buy, and stay independent long enough that the refill message does not get rewritten by an acquiring parent. Every Lifelong refill is a single-use plastic tube that the audit will not need to count in twenty years’ time.