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Revealed: Coca-Cola sells 3,500 environmentally damaging plastic bottles every second
Estimates suggest Coca-Cola sells more than 100 billion single-use plastic bottles every year – many of which find their way to the coast. (ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images)
Tom Bawden Monday April 10th 2017
The scale of Coca-Cola’s impact on the planet is laid bare today as a new investigation reveals it could be selling more than 100 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year.
The scale of Coca-Cola’s impact on the planet is laid bare today as a new investigation reveals it could be selling more than 100 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year.
The world’s biggest soft drinks company, with more than 500 brands including Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite, does not publicly disclose the volume of plastic it generates each year.
But a Greenpeace investigation has concluded that the group sells nearly 3,500 environmentally-damaging single-use bottles every second.
Making the company’s environmental impact even more damaging, Coca Cola is using more of these throwaway bottles now than it was a decade ago, despite the company declaring in 2010 that “a one-use bottle is simply not a viable option for our business”, it found.
Throwaway bottles are used just once before being discarded. Many of them eventually find their way into the ocean, where they break down into smaller fragments which poison and choke vast numbers of marine animals.
“Coca-Cola’s flagrantly wasteful policies really are a scandal. It’s particularly shocking to see the company going backwards when it comes to using throwaway plastic,” said joint Green Party leader Caroline Lucas.
“The rate at which Coca-Cola is pumping out single-use plastic bottles is just breath-taking,” said Louise Edge, senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace.
“The company is refusing to take responsibility for its role in the plastic pollution crisis facing our oceans. Our oceans simply can’t stomach any more of Coca-Cola’s plastic,” she added.
Making the company’s environmental impact even more damaging, only 7 per cent of the throwaway bottles Coca-Cola sells are made from recycled plastic. This means vast quantities of new ‘virgin’ plastic are unnecessarily created every year, adding further to the mountain of bottles already flowing into the sea, Greenpeace says.
Coca-Cola is by no means alone among the big soft drinks producers in selling huge numbers of throwaway plastic bottles using small amounts of recycled material.
‘Embrace reusable packaging’
But with the biggest plastic footprint in the industry, the company has a particular responsibility to fundamentally change the way it operates – initially by producing all of its single-use bottles from recycled plastic and then by phasing out the use of throwaway plastic packaging altogether, Greenpeace says.
“We’re calling on Coca-Cola to ditch throwaway plastic, embrace reusable packaging and make sure the remaining packaging is made from 100 per cent recycled content, not the miserable 7 per cent it currently averages globally,” Ms Edge said.
Coca-Cola: The company
Coca-Cola is the world’s biggest soft drinks company with more than 500 brands, including Fanta, Sprite and, of course, Coke.
The group sells more than 1.9 billion drinks servings around the world every day – and makes an annual profit of around £6.5 billion.
Coca-Cola sells an estimated 108 billion to 128 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year, of which only 7 per cent are made from recycled plastic.
The company was founded in 1886 and today makes about £35 billion of revenue a year.
It spends £3.2 billion a year to market itself as a responsible, aspirational company – it has publicly stated: “Our packaging is among the debris that can be found improperly disposed of on shorelines around the world, so we have an obligation to help address marine litter in earnest.”
Although Coca-Cola refused to divulge the size of its plastic footprint, it did provide Greenpeace with some data relating to its bottles. Greenpeace put this together with other publicly-available information and confidently estimates that Coca-Cola sells in the region of 108 to 128 billion single-use plastic bottles a year.
A Coca-Cola spokesman said: “We’re disappointed to read this report from Greenpeace UK, especially as we have been consulting with them to develop our new sustainable packaging strategy which we will publish in the summer.”
“We already publish our packaging data for Europe and will consider disclosing global data based on continued discussions with Greenpeace. We recognise that marine litter is a global problem affecting the world’s oceans,” he added.
Coca-Cola’s increasing use of throwaway bottles
Coca-Cola has increased its use of throwaway plastic bottles in the past decade despite declaring in 2010 that they are ‘simply not a viable option for our business’, new research suggests.
The company’s reliance on single-use plastic bottles jumped by 12 per cent between 2008 and 2015 as a proportion of the containers it uses as sales of soft drinks in refillable bottles and other reusable vessels fell, a Greenpeace investigation has found.
What are the alternatives?
Alternatives to throwaway bottles include various schemes in which drinks companies produce more durable plastic or glass containers that can be used multiple times. The consumer is charged a bit more for the drink but gets the money back when they return the bottle, which is then cleaned and refilled. These schemes are rare in the UK but quite common in much of Europe.
Soda fountains, most commonly seen in cinemas and fast food retailers, are another way of cutting down throwaway plastic bottle use. These touch-screen vending machines use a variety of containers depending on the venue such as glasses, paper cups and reusable plastic mugs. They include Coca-Cola’s Freestyle soda fountain.
Greenpeace had enough information to determine that Coca-Cola’s throwaway plastic bottle use has increased as a proportion of the containers it uses.
Researchers also believe that the number of single-use plastic bottles Coca-Cola uses has increased in the past decade although it was unable to confirm that because the company refused to disclose certain information, Greenpeace says.
“We’d love for Coke to come clean on its plastic footprint and provide detailed breakdowns of what it produces annually,” said Ms Edge.
Revealed: Coca-Cola sells 3,500 environmentally damaging plastic bottles every second - The i newspaper online iNews
See also:
Futures Forum: The alternatives to plastic
Futures Forum: Plastic bags: You can't throw something away, because there is no 'away'
Futures Forum: The plastics industry is "incredibly supportive of recycling legislation over a more long-term… reduction of disposable culture."
Futures Forum: Saving the oceans from plastic pollution >>> Bring in a deposit scheme on plastic bottles
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