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

By contrast, this analysis tracks the flow of plastic through the supply chain, starting with the manufacturers of the basic ingredients that go into making single use items.

The research was led by Australia's Minderoo Foundation and a consortium including LSE, market researchers Wood Mackenzie and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

US-based ExxonMobil is the biggest producer of single-use plastic, the report says, followed by: 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.

According to the foundation's director of finance and transparency, Dominic Charles, the research highlights "how the future of the plastic waste crisis is in the hands of just 20 companies".

He says: "It's an extraordinary point of leverage for regulators, for finance institutions, to influence them in order that rather than producing from fossil fuels, they produce plastic that's recycled."

He adds that 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."

One of the contributors is Prof Sam Fankhauser, a specialist in climate change economics at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

He observes: "Our reliance on oil and gas is not only fuelling climate change, but as the primary material used in the production of throwaway plastics also devastating our oceans.

"It is critically important petrochemical companies move towards circular economy-based alternatives if we are going to successfully tackle these interlinked crises.