Eh, the headline is kind of misleading

>they used data from brand information on plastic litter and found that 24 percent of the waste with an identifiable brand came from just five companies: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, and Altria.

>Over five years, volunteers in 84 countries analyzed over 1,800,000 pieces of plastic that they collected during clean-up events. Just over half the analyzed items had a visible brand.

1) It wasn't 24%, it was 24% of the half that could be identified.

2) It's only of the litter collected during clean-up events, so will be skewed towards waste from products used outside. This will ignore things like industrial plastic waste, fishing nets (which is a big issue in ocean plastics), etc.

That said it still seems like an important study.

There's also the question of what is actually problematic waste, that causes issues for humans or animals. Plastic in landfill isn't "good", but as long as it doesn't contaminate groundwater AFAIK it's harmless.

The fact that Altria (ex Philip Morris), a tobacco brand, made it to this list is telling IMO. There is no way that the cigarette packaging produces that much identifiable plastic trash.

My guess would be that in some countries, the stores provide disposable plastic bags with any purchase and that these bags include ads for tobacco brands. This study would associate the brand with the generation of trash while the trash should rather be associated with the store.

I'll personally classify this study as unreliable.

>It wasn't 24%, it was 24% of the half that could be identified.

with a large enough data set the chance that the half that cannot be identified is also 24% looks pretty good, unless there is something specifically about these brands that makes the identifying of them easier than other brands - which is also a pretty good chance I would say.

If there is a good likelihood of identifying these brands specifically then I guess it is actually pretty close to 12% (assuming there are still some small amount which cannot be identified)