Eoca-Eola is urged to ditch throwaway plastic bottles in clean-up campaign
ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNERS have called on soft drinks giant Coca-Cola to “ditch throwaway plastic” as they estimated it produced more than 100bn single-use bottles a year.
Greenpeace is campaigning against throwaway drinks bottles, which it says are a visible part of the problem of plastics pollution in the world’s oceans, forming the most common type of plastic packaging found washed up on shorelines globally.
Millions of tonnes of plastics are ending up in the ocean every year, harming marine wildlife, taking centuries to break down and spreading toxic chemicals, the green group says.
A recent survey of the major global soft drinks firms suggested that more than two million tonnes of throwaway plastic are sold each year by five of the six major companies, with only a small proportion made from recycled materials.
But Coca-Cola did not supply Greenpeace with figures for its survey. Now the environmental group has estimated that the number of plastic bottles it sells, based on annual sales figures of certain product lines and their proportion of the overall packaging mix, is in the region of 108 to 128 billion a year.
The company’s use of single-use plastic bottles is on the increase, and now makes up almost 60 per cent of Coca-Cola’s global packaging, Greenpeace claims.
The campaigners also accused the drinks giant of failing to meet a 2015 target to source 25 per cent of plastic bottles from recycled or renewable sources and of having no new global targets for boosting recycled content.
Senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace UK, Louise Edge, said: “In the UK alone, 16m plastic bottles end up in our environment every single day.”
A Coca-Cola Great Britain spokeswoman said the company was disappointed by the report, as they had been consulting with Greenpeace on their new sustainable packaging strategy.
“Coca-Cola is one of the few consumer goods companies whose packaging is 100 per cent recyclable. In Great Britain, we have reduced the amount of packaging we by use by 15 per cent since 2007.”