Top soda brand, Coca-Cola, has topped the list of a 2019 audit about which company was the largest plastic polluter of plastic trash around the world. The report outcome showed that the soft drink conglomerate was shockingly responsible for more plastic waste than the next three companies on the list combined.
The audit was conducted by Break Free From Plastic, a global movement that was established in 2016 whose vision is to see ‘a future free from plastic pollution.’ The audit consisted of 848 cleanup events over six continents and 51 countries overall. There were 72,541 volunteers in total, picking up pieces of plastic, wrappers, scraps, bags and other types of waste from beaches, waterways, city streets and neighborhoods during a one-day cleanup last September wherever they were located.
From the total 475,000 pieces of plastic waste that were collected collectively, 11,732 of them were all Coca-Cola products. The next company in line was Nestle at number two, while the third was PepsiCo.
BREAKING: @CocaCola, @Nestle and @PepsiCo named top plastic polluters for SECOND year in a row.
It’s time we held them to account.
Read the full #BreakFreeFromPlastic #BrandAudit2019 report: https://t.co/TVptCFUDAQ pic.twitter.com/IT78TSWk1P
— breakfreefromplastic (@brkfreeplastic) October 23, 2019
Other large companies aside from the top three include Mondelez International – which has brands like Oreo, Nabisco, Ritz and Nutter Butter, along with Unilever, Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Phillip Morris International and Perfetti Van Mille.
According to Abigail Aguilar, who happens to be the plastic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, “Recent commitments by corporations. Like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo to address the crisis unfortunately continue to rely on false solutions like replacing plastic with paper bioplastics and relying more heavily on a broken global recycling system. These strategies largely protect the outdated throwaway business model that caused the plastic pollution crisis, and will do nothing to prevent these brands from being named the top polluters again in the future.”
Meanwhile, Break Free From Plastics also made a statement after many of the top countries at fault “offered mostly false solutions to the plastics crisis, underscoring how important it is for voices from beyond the consumer goods sector to demand accountability and call for an end to single-use plastics.”
The group’s global coordinator, Von Hernandez, also shared “This report provides more evidence that corporations urgently need to do more to address the plastic pollution crisis they’ve created. Their continued reliance on single-use plastic packaging translates to pumping more throwaway plastic into the environment. Recycling is not going to solve this problem.”
Hernandez also said, “Break Free From Plastic’s nearly 1,800 member organizations are calling on corporations to urgently reduce their production of single-use plastic and find innovative solutions focused on alternative delivery systems that do not create pollution.”
Also, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Coca-Cola reportedly admitted that the conglomerate accounts for 3.3 million tons of plastic packaging annually, which roughly accounts for 200,000 bottles every minute. And with many companies pledging that they will being making their products “100 percent recyclable.” But Break Free From Plastic cites that “recycling is not the magic solution it is often claimed to be,” but is sadly the corporate propaganda that most companies say they’ll do to sound more socially responsible.
Coke actually released a new plastic bottle back in 2019, saying that it was made from marine plastic that has been recycled. And the year before that, the company also vowed to collect and recycle “the equivalent of every bottle or can it sells globally.”
The problem with this is that plastic bottles are only recyclable a few times before their polymer chains shorten, which is what leads to a deterioration of their quality. Oftentimes, plastics are also made into other types of products like clothing, construction material and products that won’t get recycled again.
The Break Free From Plastic report also shared, “We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic problem, and companies that are claiming it is the solution are simply avoiding making real change.”
Unfortunately, plastic is a key component to the inner working of the global economy. While almost every global and local government knows how much harm plastic can be to the environment, it has also helped pave the way for modern society to advance in a variety of fields like medicine, water transportation, hygiene, food preservation, high technology, and tons more, making it invaluable as well.
Sadly, the world has become so accustomed to the convenience of mass consumption, where plastics are so easily thrown away after just a single use. Add to that the fact that plastic production is so much cheaper than mass producing other types of materials as well, makes it the popular choice. Although there is no exact solution to the plastic waste issue, giant companies still need to be responsible for their carbon footprint around the world.
It will also be interesting to see what this year’s statistics will show after the upcoming Break Free From Plastic global movement coming up this September, 2020.
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