According to a study released April 10, 2018 by Friends of the Earth Europe and Zero Waste Europe, on behalf of the Rethink Plastic alliance, a "rise in plastic food packaging is failing to reduce Europe’s growing food waste problem, and in some cases may even be fueling it.... annual per-capita use of plastic packaging has grown simultaneously with levels of food waste since the 1950s... The environmental impacts of plastics can be systematically underestimated when making policies which impact food packaging."