Banks have felt pressure in recent years from investors and environmental groups to curtail their financing of fossil fuel exploration. Now some of those groups are urging lenders to reexamine their relationship with the plastics industry. Banks’ financing of the largest actors in the plastics supply chain — without any sustainability criteria attached — makes them partly responsible for the tons of water bottles and other packaging cluttering the globe, an environmental coalition charged in a January report. The group, called Portfolio Earth, named Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan as the three largest financiers of plastic in the world. “By indiscriminately funding actors in the plastics supply chain, banks have failed to acknowledge their role in enabling global plastic pollution,” the coalition wrote. “They have fallen far behind other [corporate] actors that contribute to the plastic pollution crisis.” To view the full article visit the American Banker.
