How Coca-Cola undermines plastic recycling efforts
For decades, Coca-Cola has refurbished its public image as an environmental care company with donations for the recovery of nonprofits. Meanwhile, as one of the world's most polluting brands, Coke has quietly struggled to make the company responsible for plastic waste.
Audio from a meeting with recycling executives obtained by The Intercept reveals how the "giant" philanthropy of the soda giant helped curl what could have been an important tool to fight the plastic crisis – and shines the light behind the scenes tactics drink and plastic companies have quietly used in several decades to avoid responsibility for waste. The meeting of the coalition group known as Atlanta Recycles took place in January at the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials on Atlanta's south side.
Among the topics on the Recycling Experts agenda was a grant that came to Atlanta as part of a multi-million dollar campaign Coke launched "to increase recycling rates and help inspire a grassroots movement." But it quickly became clear that a possible opportunity to increase the recycling rate ̵[ads1]1; a bottleneck – was off the table.
Here's John Seydel, director of the Atlanta Mayor's Office of Resilience:
wanted to bring up here, just think and make sure you look at other cities as well as states for politics that would push for more – or stimulate more recycling. And I think it's been a very long time since Georgia even considered something like a bottleneck. I think it's something worth watching. ”
Seydel was right. If they were really interested in increasing the recycling rate, it would be worth looking at a bottle or container suggestion that requires beverage companies to pay a price for their drink after it is returned. People are far more likely to return their bottles if there is a financial incentive. Bottled bank states recycle about 60 percent of bottles and cans, as opposed to 24 percent in other states. And states that have bottled banknotes also have an average of 40 percent less drinking container garbage on their shores, according to a 2018 study by the US and Australia published in the journal Marine Policy.
But bottlenecks also place some of the responsibility – and costs, on recycling back to the waste producing companies, which may be why coke and other soft drinks companies have long fought against them.
that the answer is a big no. ”
It is Gloria Hardegree, executive director of the Georgia Recycling Coalition, an organization that receives funds from Coca-Cola. And she was sure that the organization's long-standing benefactor would be put to death for a bottleneck:
that Coke is getting ready to make in Atlanta and in other big cities across the United States with this world without waste, it's not going to be a part of the conversation. … So you want to sabotage it with the investment? Or do you just want to go with what Coke says they should do with their money? "
The World Without Waste program, as Hardegree mentioned, is what Coke calls its" comprehensive plan "to recycle each bottle and can be produced by 2030. It's a lofty goal, and many would say it's unrealistic, especially without state or national deposit laws. But Hardegree made it clear that she did not expect Coke to bow – and that the money was conditional on not pushing for this effective recycling strategy.
do it their way, or we can drop out, you know, in funding that they're getting ready to give. ”
Kanika Greenlee, CEO of Keep Atlanta Beautiful Commission and Vice President of Keep America Beautiful, which receives Coke funding, agreed that the Atlanta-based company is likely to raise funds if the group decided to support bottling. Greenlee also serves as director of environmental programs for the City of Atlanta.
it is – not that the bottle note is not like a worthy conversation, but I feel it can bring the funding we have in place. ”[19659015] Coke is not the only soda company that is likely to oppose working with bottling. Here's Hardegree again, answering a question from Seydel:
aboard, who else would fight it? "
" Everyone in the bottling and drinking industry: Pepsi, Coke, Dr. Pepper. "
When asked about his comments at the meeting, Seydel said he stands by them. He also praised Coke's recent efforts to make plastic bottles found in the ocean. "It's really cool that they think out of the box," Seydel said. "Things are changing and they need to change."
In an email, Gloria Hardegree wrote that the purpose of the January meeting was to review the group's annual work plan. "The policy issue was brought out of context by another person present." The discussion on bottlenecks, Hardegree wrote in another email, "was a very small part of an annual planning meeting with goals + projects for the group that supports extensive city recycling."
Kanika Greenlee did not respond to requests for comment. spokesman for Keep America Beautiful said Greenlee represented the city of Atlanta and Keep Atlanta Beautiful Commission at the meeting.
In an email response to questions from The Intercept, a Coca-Cola representative said the company awarded a recycle partnership to support a community recycling program in Atlanta, which was designed to increase street recycling, improve collection, expand multi-family residential recycling, and increase university college recycling. The email said that no one from the company was present at the meeting, and that "the company's views on public policy is independent of the charity grant from The Coca-Cola Foundation. "
Blami ng Consumers
While other soft drinks companies have counteracted bottle bills, Coke should know better than almost anyone how successful deposits can be to get customers to return the bottles: They were groundbreaking in the system. For decades, Coca-Cola was only available in returnable glass bottles. In 1948, when cola drinkers put down a small incidence – nearly half of what they paid for the drink – they returned 96 percent of the characteristic fluffy bottles, according to a study done that year by the United States Resource Conservation Committee. [19659002] But everything changed after Coke began switching to plastic bottles in the 1950s. As the waste was stacked, the crowd began to pressure the company to take responsibility for it. Coke pushed back hard with a double-edged strategy that attacked attempts to get the industry to deal with its waste while pushing the message that consumers should instead blame the problem. Both were largely achieved through generic-sounding organizations working on behalf of Coke and other bottling and bottling companies while keeping their brands out of the public eye.
In 1953, just after Vermont passed the country's first bottling session, a group of beverage and packaging companies along with Philip Morris founded the anti-charcoal organization Keep America Beautiful. "Keep America Beautiful was a direct response to what happened in Vermont," said Susan Collins, president of the Container Recycling Institute, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to studying and improving recycling in North America.
Coke & # 39; s strategy for using other organizations It was helpful to convey their messages. In 1968, when state and federal legislation was proposed that would have made deposits on non-returnable containers mandatory, Coke did not lobby for it, at least not publicly. Instead, it was the National Soft Drink Association, funded by Coke, that did the job of defeating the bill. At the same time, Keep America Beautiful stated that "keeping America beautiful is your job." Those who failed in that job were "garbage cans", or, as the nonprofit made disturbingly clear in a video that year, pigs.
In response to questions related to this article, Noah Ullman, a spokesman for Keep America Beautiful, wrote in an email that "KAB is not against bottle bills. We believe that all options for addressing recycling, including deposit legislation, must be on the table and evaluated. This is not a new position for KAB. ”
Meanwhile, Coke created a people-friendly, earth-friendly corporate image. In 1971, put together between two legislative battles in which lobbyists funded by Coca-Cola and other beverage companies defeated federal bills that would have banned non-returnable drink bottles, Coke released his now infamous "hilltop" ad. Even when supported by the trade association, it quietly blocked the establishment of a national system that could have managed the huge waste it would produce, publicly, and Coke permanently smelted the brand name to "apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves. "
A massive subsidy to the beverage industry
Coca-Cola now makes 117 billion plastic bottles a year, according to its own estimates, with billions of which ending up being burned or dumped in landfills and nature. Coke was responsible for more waste than any other company in a global plastic cleanup in 2018, conducted by the advocacy group Break Free From Plastic, with Coke-branded plastic found along the coast and in the parks and streets of 40 of 42 participating countries. [19659002] On the political front, its advocates for bottle bills have largely succeeded. Only 10 states now have bottled notes on the books, most of which went in the 1970s and 1980s. Georgia, where the meeting with recycling leaders was held, is not one of them. Like most of the country and the world, the state finds itself flooded with plastic. In just the first six months of this year, Georgia exported 21.6 million kilos of plastic waste, mostly to poor countries with little ability to handle it, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Senegal, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.
Why has Coke and the other beverage companies fought so hard against bottle notes? "At the heart of it is an obligation not to be responsible for their packaging," says Collins of the Container Recycling Institute. "It all comes down to this being an expense, and they prefer someone else to pay for it."
According to Collins, financing the industry to local nonprofit organizations has been an important tool to combat bottlenecks. "Coca-Cola and other beverage companies to a certain extent fund the recycling organizations in all states and use these funds in influential ways," she said. "They are exerting pressure on these organizations to speak out against laws on the existence of drinking containers." If Coke openly made the case against bottlenecks, it would be perceived as an act of self-interest. "But when the words come out of the mouth of recycling staff," said Collins, "especially state recycling organizations, then those words have some weight."
Coke's decades of behind-the-scenes efforts have succeeded in shifting waste management costs from Coke and other beverage companies to municipal recycling programs, according to Bartow Elmore, historian and author of "Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism." Coke "took something the company had to control and pay for and really put it out to the public, "said Elmore, who described the taxpayer-funded on-street recycling that emerged in the absence of a nationwide deposit system like" a huge grant we ended up giving the beverage industry. "
Keeping Recycling Dysfunctional
Non-profit organizations that finance the beverage and plastics industry have gotten in the way of other meaningful efforts to address recycling," said Mitch Hedlund, CEO of non-profit Recycle Across America. Hedlund met with the board of directors Keep America Beautiful in August to discuss the use of standardized bins recycling labels, which help prevent waste stream contamination, which is part of the reason why only about a fifth of our garbage is recycled. and throughout the state of Rhode Island, standardized labels led to reduced waste collection costs and increased recycling rates, according to tracking by Recycle Across America.However, Keep America Beautiful decided not to use the labels, as Hedlund found out by email days later.
Hedlund said she was not surprised over that Keep America Beautiful – whose board members include executives from Coca-Cola North America, the American Chemistry Council, and Dow, the world's largest plastic manufacturer – ultimately chose not to use standardized labels. "They all benefit from the fact that recycling does not work," said Hedlund, whose organization developed but did not benefit financially from the labels. But she said she was surprised when the organization's executive director, Helen Lowman, admitted several days later that some of the company's board members stood in the way that Keep America Beautiful would improve the recycling process.
In a conversation Hedlund planned with Lowman to describe the meeting, "I said, Helen, you and your organization are highly compromised by these conflicts of interest," Hedlund recalled. "And she said 'You're right. You are 100 percent right. & # 39; ”Hedlund said she went on to state the reasons why she believed the plastic manufacturers on the Keep American Beautiful board could object to strategies that significantly increase recycling rates.
"It's just clear that the Recycling Partnership and Keep America Beautiful are really heavily influenced by the virgin plastics industry," Hedlund recalled, telling Lowman. "There will be no place for the socially standardized label solution because they know it works and when it works, they know that it will dramatically reduce the amount of virgin plastic production they will produce in the United States and globally. "According to Hedlund agreed to this assessment.
Through Ullman, the spokesman for Keep America Beautiful, Lowman said that" she have no recollection of that quote or conversation in conversation "with Hedlund. Ullman also wrote in an email that Keep America Beautiful" does not violate standardized labels. We believe clear communication and standardization are part of the solution to a very complex problem. "
Ulmann also wrote that" We have adjusted targets with [Recycle Across America][Container Recycling Institute] and others. We all want to encourage and improve recycling. But we also believe in a three-sector approach to achieving this, with nonprofit organizations, producers and government working together. We get it that some people do not agree with that approach. We see it as the best way to achieve our similar goals. We will get past all these semantic arguments and get some things achieved. ”
A Global Strategy
Coca-Cola seems to have distributed a similar strategy worldwide. The company supports environmental and recycling organizations in dozens of countries, including Keep New Zealand Beautiful, Ukraine Without Waste, Keep Britain Tidy, Ciudad Saludable in Lima and Keep Australia Beautiful.
Several months ago, Coke came out in support of a bottle deposit program in Australia. And in 2017, the company announced that it would support a similar plan in Scotland. This announcement followed the release of a leaked Greenpeace document showing that the company was lobbying against deposit systems and "refillable quotas" in Europe for several years.
In his email, Coke said "The Coca-Cola system participates in deposit systems around the world and has been doing so for 40 years, including throughout Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria and throughout Europe." [19659002] Still, much of the company's international largesse seems designed to encourage a sense of personal responsibility for waste, and in 2017, the Coca-Cola Foundation gave $ 345,000 to the American India Foundation Trust to support recycling contests and "quarterly awareness tours," for example, and $ 209,379 to support the cleanup of marine debris on the canals of Amsterdam and Rotterdam with 3600 school children.
Among the grants from the Coca-Cola Foundation in Indonesia was a $ 172,129 gift to an organization called Yayasan Greeneration Indonesia to educate tourists about responsible and sustainable tourism and empower locals to start managing and reducing waste to keep their surroundings clean, "according to the foundation's list ove A subsidy was paid in 2017.
But the island nation continues to be overrun with plastic, much of it from Coca-Cola, according to Nina van Toulon, founder and director of the Indonesian waste platform. “You go to the most remote village here, hours anywhere, and there is bottled water and cola. But then the people in the village burn it, "said van Toulon, who is based on the island of Flores. "These companies have made efforts to get their products to these villages, but they are not trying to get the plastic back from the villages."
Philanthropic giving that encourages incremental solutions and gives the beverage industry a "green image" is part of the problem, van Toulon said. "All these voluntary organizations are very vulnerable because they have no funds.
"These companies have made efforts to bring their products to these villages, but they are not trying to get the plastic back from the villages." [19659050] The residents of Hulhumalé, Maldives, have faced a similar problem. Plastic bottles litter the streets and beaches of the one-and-a-half-mile island in South Asia. Cleaning them costs more than a million dollars each year. Then four residents came together to solve the problem, and received a grant from the U.N. development program and a local telecommunications company, Ooredoo Maldives. Their pilot project, a reimbursement plan for plastic bottles that was completed in May, resulted in 81 percent of plastic bottles being returned.
But that success was despite Coca-Cola obstructionism, according to Ahmed Afrah Ismail, a member of the team that created the pilot program. Although a local Coke representative in an initial meeting said the company would support the project, Ismail said it later refused to provide its production data, which was needed to set recycling targets. The team met the three biggest sellers of bottled water in the Maldives, including Coke, which owns the local brands Bonaqua and Aquarius.
"Of the three companies, they were the least responsive," said Ismail, who noted that the company's local representatives were not aware of Coca-Cola's promise to recycle all the bottles it produces by 2030. "Our entire team felt they were trying to expose the pilot. We felt like they were trying to sabotage the whole thing. "
Coca-Cola did not comment on Ismail's description of its experience with the company, but pointed to the support for" package collection cooperation "with packaging grants and the Recycling Alliance for Indonesia Sustainable Environment, which" supports sustainable and integrated packaging waste management solutions in Indonesia. . "
Ultimately, it can't say anything about Coke helping or standing in the way of the small island's bottle deposit plan. The Maldives has announced its intention to phase out disposable plastics as a nation by 2023. In the meantime, it will introduce expanded producer liability schemes, such as bottle deposits.
The Maldives are not alone in moving towards this simple and effective approach to the bottles being assembled around the world. For the past two years, there has been an international flurry of enthusiasm for bottle notes. In January 2017, just under 300 million people lived in places that had deposit laws, according to a recent article in Resource Recycling magazine. Since then, container deposits have been in place in, among others, Romania, the United Kingdom, India and Turkey. By 2021, when the new programs are underway, the number of people with deposit laws will have doubled to 600 million. And by 2030 the number is expected to reach at least 1 billion.
Here in the United States, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. Container redemption programs have ended recently. And beverage financing companies, including Keep America Beautiful and its 707 local affiliates, have a leading role in how plastic waste is cleaned – or not.
Their money is particularly influential in the wake of China's decision not to accept plastic waste, which has made recycling prohibitively expensive in an increasing number of cities. "There is a check on everyone's head," said Hedlund of Recycle Across America. Despite the reality behind the scenes, the beverage and plastics industry's huge resources allow groups they fund to convey that they are leading the charge to improve recycling. "Publicly, they say they are for everything that works," Hedlund said. "But work bans, redemption programs work, and standardized labels work, and they're against all of that."
In Atlanta, plastic will not be the subject of a bottleneck at any time. After Seydel brought up the idea, the room erupted into a heated argument.
(Audio of the room arguing)
"Okay, let's stop this here."
Finally, the group decided to take the money, with plastic strings attached.
