4 ms·

Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study

51 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-be-good-for-the-environment/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  False dichotomy. No one is using less gas because we are using single-use plastics. It’s not like gasoline anywhere in the developed world is so expensive (taxes aside, as they are not a matter of supply-and-demand) that if there were less contention from single-use plastics it would be cheaper and people would be buying/burning more.
  - nondave 5y ago
    Counterexample: when I used to own a car in the UK, I would absolutely minimise fuel consumption due to cost.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    The entire field of economics is based on the idea that if you increase the price of something, people will buy less of it. If we increase the demand for plastic, that increases demand for fossil fuels (since fossil fuels are needed to make plastic), which makes the price go up, which means people will buy a bit less fossil fuel to burn in their vehicles etc. Just search for "gas prices" on Google News and you'll see that people are very concerned about the price of gas. Much more than most commodities, actually.
- layla5alive 5y ago
  We emit >40 Gigatons of CO2 per year. This article is talking about sequestering 10 Gigatons over 30 years inside non-biodegradable plastic waste. That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick. It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")
  - waheoo 5y ago
    There is no silver bullet to solve the CO2 problem but there are many small initiatives that can, in aggregate, make progress. So while this won't solve it on its own, neither will anything else. We need to start doing what we can and stop worrying about whether it will be enough in isolation.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    >It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'") Suppose I get upset about all the fossil fuel which is being burned and decide to do something about it. I buy up fossil fuel and instead of burning it, I sequester it underground in such a way that it can't be used by drilling companies. This seems clearly good for the environment, no? "Wasting" plastic does exactly this. If you buy ordinary non-biodegradable plastic, and dispose of it in the garbage so it goes to the landfill, you are effectively buying up fossil fuel which could have been burned, paying someone to transform it into solid form so it can't easily be used as fuel, and sequestering it underground. Of course it is not a complete solution to global warming. But it is something we should encourage people to do.
    - layla5alive 5y ago
      It costs CO2 to manufacture and transport that plastic. Did you not pay attention to the numbers I quoted for why this isn't a "solution?"
- Flashtoo 5y ago
  As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based, although I would wager that the production of single use plant-based plastics still results in net positive carbon emissions. Nearly all plastic is not plant-based. Even then, plastic waste is not collected and stored in a responsible manner. It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest, usually finding its way into nature. The environmental impact of a thing is more than just its carbon footprint.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    >As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based At the very top: "It’s usually made from petroleum, which is better in a landfill than in a tank of gasoline" "It" being plastic. The common non-plant-based kind. And later: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car." It's good if there is more demand for non-plant-based plastic, because then we burn less fossil fuel. >It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest The most common way plastic is disposed of is in a landfill. The carbon is being sequestered underground, in other words.
    - Pfhreak 5y ago
      "It's better dumped in a landfill" is miles away from "sequesters carbon". Pumping oil into a landfill wouldn't be sequestering carbon, so I'm not sure why pumping oil, processing it into plastics, shipping it all over, and then dumping it in a landfill would be.
      - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Global warming is an emergency. Ultimately what matters is minimizing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You could do that by pumping oil into a landfill in a way that it can't be burned (note that it could be burned in its original state, that's why it was extracted for fuel!), or you could do it by taking CO2 out. CO2 is CO2. You should do whichever will reduce atmospheric CO2 most effectively.
- technocratius 5y ago
  Your paraphrasing of the source you reference is slightly incomplete/misleading, as the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only. Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicle. In other words: the sustainability problem with current-day plastics is not so much in it's carbon footprint, but more the damaging effect to various ecosystems and human health.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    >the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only. That's most plastic though. Your average soda bottle is not biodegradable on any meaningful timescale. As the article puts it: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."
- flukus 5y ago
  It sequesters carbon that was already sequestered. Probably emits a non-trivial amount during the extraction, transportation and re-sequestering stages too.
- _Microft 5y ago
  Storing plastic waste is better than burning it, carbondioxide-wise (not taking into account additives or whatelse can leak out of them). Not making plastics from fossil carbon sources at all is better. Making plastics from non-fossil sources even sequesters carbon but as far as I know, this amount is almost negligible at the moment.
benjaminjosephw 5y ago
> until now the emphasis of efforts to curb plastic pollution has been on the individual choices that consumers can make. "But we need to go after the tap, to turn off the tap of fossil fuel plastics and we need to create plastics from recycled material." It's hardly as if if single-use plastics is ExxonMobil's only source of income. I say it's high time that this firm starts paying for the externalities it has so readily ignored which the rest of the world is paying so dearly for.
_pdp_ 5y ago
That’s good news. At least the list is short and we can start form somewhere.
- marak830 5y ago
  Unless us, as countries, start forcing those recycling costs(actually costs, not sell to a foreign country to burn or dump), then we arnt really starting. Those costs needs to be baked into the purchase price, or nothing will change
sneak 5y ago
Why is single-use plastic a bad thing? It always seemed to me that the disdain for it was more from an emotional thing than an actual harm caused by it, but admittedly I am mostly ignorant of the situation. Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad? The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?
- crygin 5y ago
  They break down into microplastics.
- layla5alive 5y ago
  Where do you think microplastics come from, exactly?
  - sampo 5y ago
    Clothes, car tyres, cosmetics, fishing nets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Sources
    - layla5alive 5y ago
      The other 20-40% come from plastic bottles and other plastic trash which gets broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. Whale consumes plastic bottle... eventually that bottle is no longer a bottle anymore...
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Tires and therefor cars.
- enchiridion 5y ago
  Doesn't all single use plastic eventually turn into micro plastic?
  - 01100011 5y ago
novaRom 5y ago
TOP 20 (copy from the article, with alignment): ExxonMobil, Dow, Sinopec, Indorama Ventures, Saudi Aramco, PetroChina, LyondellBasell, Reliance Industries, Braskem, Alpek SA de CV, Borealis, Lotte Chemical, INEOS, Total, Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical, Far Eastern New Century, Formosa Plastics Corporation, China Energy Investment Group, PTT and China Resources.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Not the list I was expecting. That is people making the plastics in factories. But yes, petrochemical products come from firms producing petrochemicals...
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  So Vale, Rio Tinto and BHP are behind all weapons in the world?
danhak 5y ago
I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle. One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer. Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons. It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.
- lacker 5y ago
  the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.
  - poloniculmov 5y ago
    The local trash company gives the plastic to another company who pretends to handle recycling, they send it off to a company in Indonesia who then dumps it in the ocean.
    - MrPatan 5y ago
      So it was always better to not separate the plastic for recycling, just send it to the dump.
- bbu 5y ago
  >the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious according to Seaspiracy, almost 50% of the plastic in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I guess there are "Just 20 firms" (different) behind everything. Food, construction, ... (not to belittle the single-use plastic waste problem)
lazyjones 5y ago
Single-use plastics aren't going away, even the "wokest" corporations use them for packaging. The problem is that in most countries and most households, they end up in residual waste where they're burned rather than recycled. Not even in modern, environmentally-conscious, high tax countries like Austria the garbage processing has been modernized to the point where plastics are separated and recycled from collected residual waste. This is what needs to be done (would be a good issue to regulate with EU law, as opposed to many others).
- bbu 5y ago
  only a few plastics can really be recycled. plastic recycling is hard and not worth the money as long as pumping out new stuff is way cheaper. Thus the need of taxing the production of single use stuff.
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    Higher taxes for single-use plastics will just mean that the consumer ends up with less money and the same environmental damage (they'll pay for it). What's the point? Such issues should be solved with technological innovation.
lacker 5y ago
I found this recent article from Our World In Data much more informative about plastic waste: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics There's a huge difference between "plastic waste in a landfill" and "plastic waste in the ocean." It's not like landfills just leak some % into the ocean every year. Some countries just throw far, far more of their plastic waste into the ocean. More specifically here's a chart on where ocean plastic comes from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-the-ocean?tab=chart&country=BGD~CMR~PHL~CHN~IND~NGA~BRA~LKA~USA~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-... The Philippines alone is putting more than 100 times as much plastic into the ocean as the United states is. And this isn't per-capita, this is total. When it comes to plastic getting into the ocean, recycling plastic does nothing. Recycling plastic is like a religious ritual that reminds us that we need to care about the environment. It isn't actually doing anything. What needs to happen is that the countries that handle their trash badly - the Philippines, India, China, Brazil, Bangladesh - need to stop dumping so much plastic trash into the ocean.
- mariusor 5y ago
  One has to wonder, where those countries get all that trash from. Would it perhaps be from first world countries like the US that don't deal with theirs responsibly and just export it there? Why yes, yes it would[1]. [1] https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic-waste-but-now-other-countries-are-rejecting-it.html https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic...
rsj_hn 5y ago
One of the problems with these types of pieces that focus on trying to encourage activism rather than reporting on newsworthy topics they generally don't know the relevant facts in the areas being discussed. 20 firms is a surprising amount of diversity given the current level of concentration in manufacturing, which is well know to have economies of scale. Well known, that is, except to the BBC. Imagine how much more diversity we'd have if the top 20 producers in auto, airplane, laptop, cellphone, or chip manufacturing only had 50% of the market. That would really add more competition. To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share). So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics. Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.

51 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

Single-use plastic waste is good. It sequesters carbon. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-be-good-for-the-environment/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...

ComputerGuru 5y ago
False dichotomy. No one is using less gas because we are using single-use plastics. It’s not like gasoline anywhere in the developed world is so expensive (taxes aside, as they are not a matter of supply-and-demand) that if there were less contention from single-use plastics it would be cheaper and people would be buying/burning more.
- nondave 5y ago
  Counterexample: when I used to own a car in the UK, I would absolutely minimise fuel consumption due to cost.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  The entire field of economics is based on the idea that if you increase the price of something, people will buy less of it. If we increase the demand for plastic, that increases demand for fossil fuels (since fossil fuels are needed to make plastic), which makes the price go up, which means people will buy a bit less fossil fuel to burn in their vehicles etc. Just search for "gas prices" on Google News and you'll see that people are very concerned about the price of gas. Much more than most commodities, actually.
layla5alive 5y ago
We emit >40 Gigatons of CO2 per year. This article is talking about sequestering 10 Gigatons over 30 years inside non-biodegradable plastic waste. That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick. It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")
- waheoo 5y ago
  There is no silver bullet to solve the CO2 problem but there are many small initiatives that can, in aggregate, make progress. So while this won't solve it on its own, neither will anything else. We need to start doing what we can and stop worrying about whether it will be enough in isolation.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'") Suppose I get upset about all the fossil fuel which is being burned and decide to do something about it. I buy up fossil fuel and instead of burning it, I sequester it underground in such a way that it can't be used by drilling companies. This seems clearly good for the environment, no? "Wasting" plastic does exactly this. If you buy ordinary non-biodegradable plastic, and dispose of it in the garbage so it goes to the landfill, you are effectively buying up fossil fuel which could have been burned, paying someone to transform it into solid form so it can't easily be used as fuel, and sequestering it underground. Of course it is not a complete solution to global warming. But it is something we should encourage people to do.
  - layla5alive 5y ago
    It costs CO2 to manufacture and transport that plastic. Did you not pay attention to the numbers I quoted for why this isn't a "solution?"
Flashtoo 5y ago
As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based, although I would wager that the production of single use plant-based plastics still results in net positive carbon emissions. Nearly all plastic is not plant-based. Even then, plastic waste is not collected and stored in a responsible manner. It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest, usually finding its way into nature. The environmental impact of a thing is more than just its carbon footprint.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based At the very top: "It’s usually made from petroleum, which is better in a landfill than in a tank of gasoline" "It" being plastic. The common non-plant-based kind. And later: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car." It's good if there is more demand for non-plant-based plastic, because then we burn less fossil fuel. >It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest The most common way plastic is disposed of is in a landfill. The carbon is being sequestered underground, in other words.
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    "It's better dumped in a landfill" is miles away from "sequesters carbon". Pumping oil into a landfill wouldn't be sequestering carbon, so I'm not sure why pumping oil, processing it into plastics, shipping it all over, and then dumping it in a landfill would be.
    - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
      Global warming is an emergency. Ultimately what matters is minimizing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You could do that by pumping oil into a landfill in a way that it can't be burned (note that it could be burned in its original state, that's why it was extracted for fuel!), or you could do it by taking CO2 out. CO2 is CO2. You should do whichever will reduce atmospheric CO2 most effectively.
technocratius 5y ago
Your paraphrasing of the source you reference is slightly incomplete/misleading, as the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only. Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicle. In other words: the sustainability problem with current-day plastics is not so much in it's carbon footprint, but more the damaging effect to various ecosystems and human health.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only. That's most plastic though. Your average soda bottle is not biodegradable on any meaningful timescale. As the article puts it: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."
flukus 5y ago
It sequesters carbon that was already sequestered. Probably emits a non-trivial amount during the extraction, transportation and re-sequestering stages too.
_Microft 5y ago
Storing plastic waste is better than burning it, carbondioxide-wise (not taking into account additives or whatelse can leak out of them). Not making plastics from fossil carbon sources at all is better. Making plastics from non-fossil sources even sequesters carbon but as far as I know, this amount is almost negligible at the moment.

benjaminjosephw 5y ago

> until now the emphasis of efforts to curb plastic pollution has been on the individual choices that consumers can make. "But we need to go after the tap, to turn off the tap of fossil fuel plastics and we need to create plastics from recycled material." It's hardly as if if single-use plastics is ExxonMobil's only source of income. I say it's high time that this firm starts paying for the externalities it has so readily ignored which the rest of the world is paying so dearly for.

_pdp_ 5y ago

That’s good news. At least the list is short and we can start form somewhere.

marak830 5y ago
Unless us, as countries, start forcing those recycling costs(actually costs, not sell to a foreign country to burn or dump), then we arnt really starting. Those costs needs to be baked into the purchase price, or nothing will change

sneak 5y ago

Why is single-use plastic a bad thing? It always seemed to me that the disdain for it was more from an emotional thing than an actual harm caused by it, but admittedly I am mostly ignorant of the situation. Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad? The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?

crygin 5y ago
They break down into microplastics.
layla5alive 5y ago
Where do you think microplastics come from, exactly?
- sampo 5y ago
  Clothes, car tyres, cosmetics, fishing nets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Sources
  - layla5alive 5y ago
    The other 20-40% come from plastic bottles and other plastic trash which gets broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. Whale consumes plastic bottle... eventually that bottle is no longer a bottle anymore...
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Tires and therefor cars.
enchiridion 5y ago
Doesn't all single use plastic eventually turn into micro plastic?
- 01100011 5y ago

novaRom 5y ago

TOP 20 (copy from the article, with alignment): ExxonMobil, Dow, Sinopec, Indorama Ventures, Saudi Aramco, PetroChina, LyondellBasell, Reliance Industries, Braskem, Alpek SA de CV, Borealis, Lotte Chemical, INEOS, Total, Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical, Far Eastern New Century, Formosa Plastics Corporation, China Energy Investment Group, PTT and China Resources.

Ekaros 5y ago
Not the list I was expecting. That is people making the plastics in factories. But yes, petrochemical products come from firms producing petrochemicals...
KingOfCoders 5y ago
So Vale, Rio Tinto and BHP are behind all weapons in the world?

danhak 5y ago

I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle. One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer. Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons. It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.

lacker 5y ago
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.
- poloniculmov 5y ago
  The local trash company gives the plastic to another company who pretends to handle recycling, they send it off to a company in Indonesia who then dumps it in the ocean.
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    So it was always better to not separate the plastic for recycling, just send it to the dump.
bbu 5y ago
>the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious according to Seaspiracy, almost 50% of the plastic in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I guess there are "Just 20 firms" (different) behind everything. Food, construction, ... (not to belittle the single-use plastic waste problem)

lazyjones 5y ago

Single-use plastics aren't going away, even the "wokest" corporations use them for packaging. The problem is that in most countries and most households, they end up in residual waste where they're burned rather than recycled. Not even in modern, environmentally-conscious, high tax countries like Austria the garbage processing has been modernized to the point where plastics are separated and recycled from collected residual waste. This is what needs to be done (would be a good issue to regulate with EU law, as opposed to many others).

bbu 5y ago
only a few plastics can really be recycled. plastic recycling is hard and not worth the money as long as pumping out new stuff is way cheaper. Thus the need of taxing the production of single use stuff.
- lazyjones 5y ago
  Higher taxes for single-use plastics will just mean that the consumer ends up with less money and the same environmental damage (they'll pay for it). What's the point? Such issues should be solved with technological innovation.

lacker 5y ago

I found this recent article from Our World In Data much more informative about plastic waste: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics There's a huge difference between "plastic waste in a landfill" and "plastic waste in the ocean." It's not like landfills just leak some % into the ocean every year. Some countries just throw far, far more of their plastic waste into the ocean. More specifically here's a chart on where ocean plastic comes from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-the-ocean?tab=chart&country=BGD~CMR~PHL~CHN~IND~NGA~BRA~LKA~USA~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-... The Philippines alone is putting more than 100 times as much plastic into the ocean as the United states is. And this isn't per-capita, this is total. When it comes to plastic getting into the ocean, recycling plastic does nothing. Recycling plastic is like a religious ritual that reminds us that we need to care about the environment. It isn't actually doing anything. What needs to happen is that the countries that handle their trash badly - the Philippines, India, China, Brazil, Bangladesh - need to stop dumping so much plastic trash into the ocean.

mariusor 5y ago
One has to wonder, where those countries get all that trash from. Would it perhaps be from first world countries like the US that don't deal with theirs responsibly and just export it there? Why yes, yes it would[1]. [1] https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic-waste-but-now-other-countries-are-rejecting-it.html https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic...

rsj_hn 5y ago

One of the problems with these types of pieces that focus on trying to encourage activism rather than reporting on newsworthy topics they generally don't know the relevant facts in the areas being discussed. 20 firms is a surprising amount of diversity given the current level of concentration in manufacturing, which is well know to have economies of scale. Well known, that is, except to the BBC. Imagine how much more diversity we'd have if the top 20 producers in auto, airplane, laptop, cellphone, or chip manufacturing only had 50% of the market. That would really add more competition. To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share). So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics. Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.