Plastic will stay, says Coca-Cola

COCA-Cola is shaking off environmentalists’ calls to change its packaging, saying there is too much demand for the plastic bottles.

The soft drink giant’s head of sustainability, Bea

Perez, told the BBC that consumers are fans of plastic-packaged drinks because they’re able to reseal their bubbles in lightweight packaging.

Doing away with plastic altogether for glass or aluminium would increase the business’s carbon footprint and weaken sales, she told the news outlet.

“So as we change our bottling infrastructure, move into recycling and innovate, we also have to show the consumer what the opportunities are. They will change with us,” she said.

The company recognises that packaging waste is a growing problem and that it has a responsibility to help solve it, according to a statement from Coca-Cola.

“All packaging has a potential environmental impact, so it’s not as simple as saying one format is better than another,” said a company representative.

Those statements don’t quite make sense to environmental activists who want the company to do more than committing to making its packaging 100% recyclable by 2025 and to make bottles with an average of 50% recycled material by 2030.

The company had the highest amount of plastic found along coasts, shorelines and parks, according to 2018 Break Free from Plastic (BFFP) study. PepsiCo, home of Coke’s rival, was right behind it, followed by Nestle.

Coca-Cola is holding its crown as the highest plastic-producing company, BFFP corporate campaign coordinator, Emma Priestland, told The Washington Post.

Companies such as Coca-Cola should be figuring out ways to fix the single-use plastic item economy they created, she said, because that move would benefit their bottom line.

“We see big companies like Coke, PepsiCo, Nestle and Unilever talk about wanting to end plastic pollution, but the (solutions) they put forward rely on individual behaviour change, and they rely on recycling,” she said.

A 2017 Sciences Advances study found that 9% of the world’s 6 300 megatons of plastic in 2015 had been recycled while 79% ended up in a landfill or somewhere else in the environment. Researchers said 12% of the plastic was incinerated.

Americans recycled and composted about 35.2% of waste in 2017, according to the latest figures from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“We just can’t recycle the amount of plastic being produced. We don’t have the infrastructure to deal with quantity,” Priestland said.

Plastic can be recycled a limited number of times before it loses its quality, National Geographic reported, but glass and metal don’t lessen in value.

Recycling only delays the inevitable fate of plastic, Priestland said.

Coca-Cola’s claim that its customers can’t part with plastic bottles shows how out of touch the company is with environmental issues, according to a statement by Greenpeace USA plastics campaigner Kate Melges.

“The solution is for Coca-Cola and other consumer goods giants to fundamentally rethink how they’re bringing products to people, centering systems of reuse and package-free options,” she said.

“As long as companies like Coke keep pushing the myth that their bottles are being turned into new bottles over and over again, we are never going to solve the plastic pollution crisis,” Melges said.

Priestland said Coca-Cola was missing the point of what activists truly desire: no plastic waste.