Coca-cola top 10 waste to the ocean

A recent survey of marine plastics counted up which big brands were responsible for the most waste.

Plastic has slowly made its way into every avenue of modern life. Drinks bottles, straws, wrappings around fruit and veg, even the bag you carry your shopping home in; it’s seemingly unavoidable. The waste produced by our insatiable appetite for this persistent material is also becoming worryingly unavoidable.

Environmental campaigns looking to prevent plastic pollution have often placed emphasis on the consumer to swap to recyclable or reusable products. Levies on disposable cups and plastic bags, although successful in pushing people to bring their own totes and containers, don’t challenge where the waste is made in the first place; the companies making money out of creating these polluting items.

Single-use plastics are the biggest problem. The proliferation of these short-used long-lived pieces of packaging is accelerating climate change at a rapid pace. A report by the Center for International Environmental Law found that by 2050 plastic will be responsible for up to 13% of the total “carbon budget” of the planet. Disposable plastic found in fast-moving consumer goods and packaging is the largest and fastest-growing aspect of this damaging industry.

So who is responsible for pushing plastics, increasing emissions and polluting our oceans?

As part of world cleanup day on September 21st 2019, Break Free From Plastic brought together 72,541 volunteers to take part in community clean-ups and find out which brands appeared most frequently in the waste they collected. Participants took plastic waste from their designated site, counted the number of pieces and used the study’s data card to identify what exactly it was made from and who had made it.

The origins of the waste weren’t always clear but 43% of the pieces collected were unmistakably identifiable as being produced by a specific consumer brand.

The organisation hopes that this data will help shift the narrative of the "top 5 marine plastic polluters" away from countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka and toward the big corporations in Europe and the United States that create the plastic waste.

Break Free From Plastic's Top Ten Polluters:

Here is the list of the top ten brands identified by the survey which collected 476,423 individual pieces of plastic waste. The ranking was determined using both the number of plastics collected but also how widespread each companies waste problem was.

1. Coca Cola:

Pieces of plastic collected: 11,732 in 37 countries

2. Nestlé

Pieces of plastic collected: 4, 846 in 31 countries

3. PepsiCo.

Pieces of plastic collected: 3,362 in 28 countries

4. Mondelez International

Pieces of plastic collected: 1,083 in 23 countries

5. Unilever

Pieces of plastic collected: 3,328 in 21 countries

6. Mars

Pieces of plastic collected: 543 in 20 countries

7. Procter & Gamble:

Pieces of plastic collected: 1,160 in 18 countries

8. Colgate - Palmolive

Pieces of plastic collected: 642 in 18 countries

9. Philip Morris International

Pieces of plastic collected: 2,239 in 17 countries

10. Perfetti van Melle

Pieces of plastic collected: 1,090 in 17 countries

The top three most common items found in the survey were plastic bags, sachets, and plastic bottles.

After speaking with volunteers who took part in the audit, the incredible number of sachets found could be linked to sachet water, used as a primary source of drinking water by many urban West African households.

"Sachets (pure water) were invented by West African entrepreneurs to address the problem of poor access to water as a cheap alternative to water bottles," says Ben Dotun Fasanya of the Centre for EarthWorks. He highlights the urgent need for sustainable solutions to this problem explaining that "There are over 250 companies involved in its production in the city of Jos alone. Sachets constitute the biggest content of environmental waste, clogging drains, breeding mosquitoes and localizing floods."

Offering "false solutions"

After a Greenpeace US report earlier this month criticised paper and bio-based plastics, the charity has taken this survey as another sign that initiatives claimed by these corporations to offer solutions are not working. “Yet again we’re seeing these corporate giants such as Coke, Nestle, and Pepsi polluting our rivers and beaches with plastic,” sais Louis Edge, head of Greenpeace UK’s ocean plastics campaign, “when it comes to their policies on plastics it’s clear that these huge global brands are planning to fail”.

Coca-Cola is claiming to address the plastic crisis with circular solutions, but are they really sustainable?

For many people, the answer to tackling numerous environmental issues is transitioning towards a circular economy. The core idea is to create a model “that is restorative by design, aiming to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times.

Given the popularity of this concept, several firms have been introducing their own SDGs and circular economy agendas with a claim towards sustainability. But circular economy applications among corporations are not always good, and their promise of future green growth is in the realm of doubt. Coca-Cola and their "World Without Waste" programme is a good example.

Ineffective Waste programme

Through this programme, Coca-Cola claims its contribution to collect and recycle bottles and cans for every one sold by 2030. Launched in 2018, this programme highlights ambitious plans: to make Coca-Cola product packaging 100% recyclable by 2025 and use 50% recycled materials in bottles and cans by 2030.

Thus, by committing to a circular economy, the multinational firm is claiming to meet the SDG 12: Responsible Production and Consumption. However, the brand audit report from the Break Free From Plastic initiative revealed Coca-Cola as the world's No 1 polluter in three consecutive years with more plastic pieces responsible than PepsiCo and Nestle - the following two top polluted brands combined.

Even more concerning, the number of Coca-Cola branded plastic items itself increased significantly by 18% and was found in 14 more countries from 2019 to 2020. Thus, the effectiveness of the "World Without Waste" programme is greatly questioned in the face of increasing plastic waste.

A spit in the plastic ocean

In 2019, Coca-Cola introduced their environmentally friendly solution to accelerate the prospect of a closed-loop economy for plastic, about 300 disposable bottles using 25% recycled ocean plastic.

However, these few hundred bottles pale when compared to the 200,000 one-way bottles Coca-Cola produces each minute. Instead of dealing with really environmentally friendly packaging strategies at the beginning, Coca-Cola has focused on mitigating the consequences caused by itself as a form of public appeasement and legitimization of increasing marine pollution with more and more single-use plastic rubbish.

This approach to the circular economy is unacceptable, and as made clear in the Progress report of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, corporations like Coca-Cola have made zero progress in addressing the plastic pollution crisis.

Are recycled bottles safe?

Another perspective to be taken into consideration is the quality of these Coke bottles made of recycled marine plastic. Coca-Cola claimed to employ new recycling technologies that break down the components of plastic and strip out impurities so they can be rebuilt as new.

However, concerns are being raised about the safety of recycled ocean plastic for food containing as the plastic source of the recycling process may contain hazardous substances to human health.

Pete Myers, the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, mentioned in his article of recycling ocean plastic that “virtually all plastics are likely to contain toxic ingredients, especially those taken from the ocean”. He later listed related diseases to these toxic ingredients such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, infertility, ADHD and autism. With such uncertainty, is Coca-Cola’s plan to go green by producing bottles from ocean plastic here to stay?

What should they focus on instead?

Coca-Cola has definitely put great efforts into planning the World Without Waste programme. Nonetheless, the fundamental change expected from it is nowhere to be found. The launch of Coca-Cola’s new bottles made from ocean plastic turned out to be nothing but a greenwashing tool. Instead of investing further and making marketing campaigns out of this, Coca-Cola should start to deal with the core problem – their overproduction of throwaway bottles.

Coca-Cola should reduce their single-used plastic output as much as possible and actually work towards a truly circular and sustainable business model.

Runner up Winner - Opinion Essay Competition 2021

This essay is one of the runner-up essays of this year's BIs sustainability opinion essay competition. Read the winner text here

References:

Robert Crocker et al. (2018). Unmaking waste in production and consumption towards the circular economy. Emerald Publishing Limited.

The Coca-Cola Company. (2019). Introducing a World-First: A Coke Bottle Made with Plastic from the Sea.

Is Coca

Most notably, The Coca-Cola Company has been the world's top plastic polluter by a significant margin every year since the global brand audit began in 2018. The 2022 brand audit found more than 31,000 Coca-Cola branded products, a 63% increase from 2021.

How is Coca

The company's widespread use of single-use plastic bottles has contributed significantly to the global plastic pollution crisis.

What is the number 1 polluter in the ocean?

Plastic is the main type of pollution in our oceans. The top six ocean pollutants are plastic, nutrients from fertilizer runoff, nonpoint sources, light, noise, and industrial chemicals.

What are the top 5 plastic waste?

Top 5 ocean plastic polluters.

SINGLE USE BAGS. ... .

BOTTLES. ... .

STRAWS. ... .

FOOD WRAPPERS & CONTAINERS. ... .

SYNTHETIC ROPES..