A Bay Area environmental group sued some of the world's biggest food, beverage and product manufacturers Wednesday, accusing them of polluting the world's oceans and waterways, including San Francisco and Monterey bays, with millions of tons of plastic.

The lawsuit, filed in San Mateo Superior Court by the Berkeley-based Earth Island Institute, accuses 10 of the giants in soft drink, food, candy, personal care and cleaning products sales of essentially overwhelming the world's ecosystem with plastic while falsely claiming the bottles, containers and packaging material they produce will be recycled when most of it won't be.

The complaint accuses Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Clorox, Danone, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Mars, Crystal Geyser and Mondelez of negligence, creating a public nuisance, breaching their warranties and failing to warn consumers about the dangers of plastics.

Earth Island, which is seeking unspecified damages, wants the court to order the companies to reduce plastic production, pay for cleanup and stop implying their plastic containers will be recycled until there are resources available to do the job.

It is the first attempt in the United States to hold the world's largest consumer products businesses liable for a plastic pollution problem that experts agree is a global environmental crisis.

"It is literally everywhere and poisoning everything and we are left to clean it up," said Sumona Majumdar, general counsel for Earth Island Institute. "Over 90% of the plastic is not being recycled and is either going to a landfill, an incinerator or ending up out in the world as pollution. ... There is simply no way we can manage all the plastic that is out there."

Representatives of the companies named in the lawsuit could not be reached immediately for comment.

It is estimated that 150 million metric tons of plastic are currently floating around in the world's oceans, and experts say the problem is getting worse. An additional 8 million to 20 million metric tons enters the ocean each year, and much of that ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the infamous mass of ocean trash, which experts say has more than doubled in size over the past decade.

At this pace, plastic will outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050, according to the suit.

But that's only part of the problem. The plastic eventually breaks down into tiny particles, known as microplastics, that can now be found mixed with beach sand and embedded in sea grass and in the bellies of fish, seabirds, whales, turtles and marine mammals who mistake it for food.

Plastic is even abundant in human water supplies, according to the lawsuit, with the average person ingesting about 5 grams, the equivalent of eating a credit card, weekly.

An October study by the Richmond-based San Francisco Estuary Institute found that a staggering 7 trillion tiny pieces of plastic wash from city streets into San Francisco Bay each year, the highest concentration of microplastics measured in any urban body of water in the U.S.

Researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute reported last June that microplastics were found from the surface of Monterey Bay to the seafloor in concentrations comparable to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Conservation groups say the plastic trash is threatening the habitat of 500 species of wildlife, including endangered chinook salmon, black abalone, a shorebird known as the California least tern, and close to two dozen other imperiled species in San Francisco Bay.

The complaint says plastic trash is releasing toxic chemicals and altering the chemical composition of the ocean as it breaks down, threatening tourism, recreation and the fishing industry. It estimates $13 billion in annual global losses, including the cost of cleaning up plastic pollution in the marine environment.

The 10 companies named in the lawsuit were identified in brand audits of plastic waste found littering beaches and waterways in coastal communities around the world last year as the source of most of the garbage. The top three - Coca Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle - were linked to 14% of the plastic pollution that was collected.

What's worse, the plaintiffs say, is that the companies claim their plastic can be recycled and have even placed labels on their products saying so. In truth, less than 10% of the plastic labeled recyclable is actually recycled, the lawsuit says.

"It's the same nonsense that big tobacco, big oil and big pharma has put out for years - that there's no disturbance to our environment," said Joe Cotchett, of the Burlingame law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, which is representing Earth Island in the lawsuit. "Big plastic is just as liable because they are doing the same thing - putting out a product that is very harmful."

The problem is that China, where almost 700,000 tons of plastic waste was sent annually as recently as four years ago, has since shut the door on much of the plastic recycling it would accept. That has forced recyclers to hold onto huge amounts of plastic, creating a surplus in the United States, which has, in turn, lowered the price, making it harder and less profitable to recycle the stuff.

And China was recycling only about 22% of the total it received. In 2016, the Ecology Center in Berkeley embedded a GPS transponder into a bale of plastic scrap, which it tracked to a town in China, where it discovered that huge piles of lower-quality plastic were being dumped into a local canyon.

California has done as much as any state to reduce the amount of plastic that gets in the water, passing bans or limits on single-use plastic bags, bottles and straws.

Environmental groups, including Earth Island Institute, are pushing companies to design reusable and compostable containers, bottles and packaging out of natural products. The problem, Majumdar said, is that plastic is inexpensive and the oil and gas industries support production, even owning some facilities that produce the raw materials.

Until something is done to reduce the amount of plastic on the market, she said, the environmental and cleanup costs to cities, counties, government agencies, nonprofit agencies and residents will keep going up.

"These companies created a market and increased consumer demand," Majumdar said, "so they should have an affirmative role in cleaning this up."

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite