Why Coke, the world’s biggest plastic polluter, makes me fizz over with rage

SOMEONE called Beatriz Perez has told the annual gathering of fatcats at Davos that Coca- Cola will not be abandoning single-use plastic bottles because ‘consumers like them’.

Ms Perez is apparently the Coca-Cola corporation’s ‘Head of Sustainability’. Can there be a more comical job description? What’s next? Hannibal Lecter as the face of Veganuary?

Coca-Cola is one of the most unsustainable companies on earth. If you ever take part in a litter pick — which I thoroughly recommend for an awful insight into what a filthy people we’ve become — you will see why.

But, as the corporation reminds us endlessly with its sponsorship of events such as the football World Cup, Coke is an international brand.

Litter

A worldwide clean-up just over a year ago found Coke’s plastic rubbish in 40 out of 42 countries. The company is the worst plastic polluter in the world. Its bottles are ubiquitous.

Small wonder: Coca- Cola produces three million tons of plastic packaging each year.

Plastic makes an ideal bottle because it is light, durable and relatively waterproof.

Unfortunately these are also the qualities that make it such a feature of litter.

Ms Perez earns about £ 350,000 plus generous benefits each year. During that time, Coca-Cola produces more than 100 billion plastic bottles. That is 200,000 bottles a minute.

In England alone, we discard 15 million plastic bottles a day. Less than half make it to a recycling plant.

But I am being unfair to Ms Perez. Head of Sustainability is just the hat she wears when she has to talk to the nobs in Davos. (Believe me, it’s the right word: I’ve attended the ghastly World

Economic Forum, and it’s beyond odious.)

For most of the time — as the tedious verbiage from Coca-Cola puts it — ‘Bea leads an integrated team across public affairs and communications, sustainability and marketing assets to support the company’s new growth model and path to become a total beverage company’.

Do not ask, dear reader, what a ‘total beverage company’ is. The job summary just means she is the company’s head of ‘ greenwashing’.

‘Greenwashing’ — making a company appear to be concerned about the environmental impact of what they do — is the contemporary version of ‘whitewashing’.

Almost every company has some lickspittle doing it — someone who will point to the one plant left alive in a polluted river and swear it’s survived because the company that tipped in the poison cared for it.

Ms Perez had an excuse to hand. She told the plutocrats in Davos that ‘ Business won’t be in business if we don’t accommodate consumers’, which was precisely what the audience wanted to hear at the ‘ Listen Up, Suckers!’ Forum.

I am not an enemy of capitalism. I recognise that when the 18th-Century ‘father of capitalism’ Adam Smith talked about ‘the hidden hand of the market’, he was uttering a profound truth.

You have only to see the miserable lives lived by the citizens of planned economies like the former Soviet Union to realise that we’re better off for it. But the market for flavoured and coloured water is an invented one. No- one needs Coke, and the company know it. They have done themselves a great favour persuading people that things go better with Coke. It’s the ‘real thing’. ( The real what, precisely?)

And, what an irony that, like a pair of Levi’s, the Coke bottle is seen as a symbol of the freedom of our times when it testifies to our enslavement by corporate brands!

We cannot blame the company for the fact that its customers keep buying its horrible products.

Ms Perez is just the latest inhabitant of the seat once occupied by the person who tried to justify Coca- Cola’s rip- off when the company launched a new product in 2004 by bottling tap water, sticking a label on the container saying ‘ Dasani’ — and then couldn’t understand why people compared them to Del Boy Trotter.

Ruthless

But that’s U.S. corporations for you. They’re humourless as well as ruthless.

Which is why it won’t do when this speak-your-weight machine creature, Ms Perez, pleads that the Coca- Cola corporation needs to continue selling its obesity-inducing products ‘ because the consumers want them’.

Coca-Cola created this market and (like so many of its customers) has grown fat on it. The problem is not only with the product, of course, but the containers.

Coca-Cola led the fizzy drink industry’s campaign to squash the idea of having returnable, reusable bottles.

Now it claims that it cannot fly in the face of consumer demand for plastic bottles. It is not its problem. Well, it is. Coca-Cola produces tonnes and tonnes of bottles each year, great numbers of which end up discarded.

Ah, says the company, but we are recycling our bottles. ‘We aim to recover every bottle for every one we sell by 2030. And then to use 50 per cent of them back in our own bottles.’ Coca-Cola says it is already recovering 59 per cent.

Recycling 59 per cent of its bottles may appear creditable — but it’s no good at all because it leaves 40 billion bottles out there as litter. Every year.

Demand

On current trends, it is predicted that by 2050 the plastic in the seas will weigh more than all the fish put together.

All this plastic pollution means we are ingesting it, too.

The World Wide Fund For Nature reports that, globally, the average person consumes almost 2,000 particles of plastic each week just from the water they drink.

Scientists say we’re eating the equivalent of an entire plastic credit card every week, two cereal bowlfuls over a year — or two wheelie bins during the course of a lifetime.

Of course it’s not CocaCola’s fault that some of the people who buy their sickly drink are morons who chuck the bottles out of car windows. But they know that excuse won’t wash any more.

Now the corporation says that it cannot stop polluting the planet because its consumers won’t let them. The poor company is powerless in the face of consumer demand.

It is an argument that demonstrates beyond a peradventure that if you drink too much of their gassed-up rubbish, it rots your brain.