Pollution & threats to the environment

Over the past seventy years, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits. They’ve poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo in sachets and plastic-packaged ultra-processed foods. We were never clamouring for any of these items, but this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits. While at first we shaped plastics, somewhere along the way, plastics took over and began shaping us. Like any addiction, our plastic habit has consequences. It is damaging our climate and biodiversity and we are only just starting to understand its effect on our own health. In investigating how we got here, ‘Consumed’ arms us to make better decisions about where we go next.