Corporate Plastic Disclosure Is Improving, but Gaps Remain

Until recently, most companies couldn't tell you how much plastic flowed through their operations – or where it ended up. As a result, governments, brands and consumers were often in the dark about how much plastic is produced, the chemicals involved and the environmental and human health impacts.

Last year, The Pew Charitable Trusts' Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025 clearly showed that solutions already exist to cut plastic pollution by 83% by 2040, and that embedding transparency throughout the plastic supply chain – through consistent, standardised corporate disclosure and reporting – must be a foundational part of those efforts. Now, a study from global nonprofit organization CDP suggests that businesses increasingly are recognizing the importance and value of disclosure.

Knowing what compounds are in the plastic that is being made and how much plastic companies are making, using and throwing away can enable businesses to improve their products and manufacturing processes, inform decision-making about effective and efficient policies, and ensure that global progress towards reducing plastic pollution is accurately measured.

Disclosure is expanding – and driving action

To help achieve these goals, CDP in 2023 expanded its global environmental disclosure system – with support from Pew, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Minderoo Foundation, and WWF – to enable companies to publicly document their plastic-related activities, impacts, risks and opportunities.

According to CDP’s report, not only are more companies disclosing, but they also are improving the depth of the information they share. Between 2023 and 2025, the number of businesses providing information to CDP’s platform rose by 44% to 4,262. These companies have a combined value of US$26.3 trillion, or 18.3% of total global market capitalization. CDP’s report also highlighted a 244% increase in the number of companies mapping plastic across their value chains. Crucially, more companies are also moving from disclosure to action. In 2025, 77% of companies had either set or had planned to set within two years targets to address plastic use and consumption, up from 61% in 2023. Setting measurable targets enables companies to track progress and improve decision-making and is a vital first step towards corporate accountability.

Broader disclosure participation is still needed

This is tremendous progress in such a short time. But realizing the full potential of disclosure will require more companies to share their production, use and disposal of plastic and to set time-bound, measurable corporate targets. Doing so will not only help reduce plastic pollution – improving the health of people and the planet – but it also can benefit business.

When companies disclose data through standardized platforms, they strengthen their ability to identify risks, such as supply chain bottlenecks, and to show investors how they are building resilience – an increasingly important consideration for financial markets. In 2025 alone, more than 640 financial institutions, representing over 25% of all institution-held assets, partnered with CDP to ask for environmental risk and impact disclosures from thousands of businesses.

Companies that disclose also better position themselves to seize opportunities. Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025 found that transforming the plastic system will shift investments towards technologies and business models of the future, unlocking significant new markets – such as an estimated US$570 billion in annual private sector spending by 2040 for implementing return- and refill-based reuse systems at scale.

CDP's report shows that companies have made meaningful progress towards systematically measuring plastic across their supply chains – but also that much more work remains to be done. Preventing plastic pollution benefits the environment, human health and businesses, but those benefits cannot be realized without greater transparency across the plastic system.

Simon Reddy is a director with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ environmental portfolio and Andrea Schnitzer is an officer with Pew’s preventing plastic pollution project.