Introduction
When taken individually, a single-use plastic bottle, a takeaway bag, or packaging from cheese seem harmless and do not disrupt major environmental processes. However, when accumulated in the landfills over months, these items represent a serious issue, especially due to the throw-away culture of consumption. The reliance of manufacturers and consumers on such plastics means they accumulate on the land at a staggering rate. Therefore, companies that produce consumer products packaged in single-use plastic should be held accountable for more effective Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts aimed at reducing the adverse impact of plastic packaging on the environment (Lindwall, 2020).
Coca-Cola is among such manufacturers, selling more than 100 billion plastic bottles per year, which is 200,000 bottles per minute (Plastic Soup Foundation, 2022). While the company has voiced its awareness of the issue, the efforts aimed at reducing its impact on the environment have not been tangible yet. Thus, this paper will discuss Coca-Cola’s production practices as related to the manufacturing of millions of single-use plastic bottles from the perspectives of sustainable business models, the circular economy, and greenwashing (Garg, 2022). Besides, the exploration will include considerations of the industry non-governmental (NGO) recommendations and best practices that Coca-Cola could embed into its business.
Major Issues
Coca-Cola operates more than five hundred brands and sells billions of plastic bottles. The reason behind choosing single-use plastic in packaging is the potential to save on production costs, which allows for selling its products in every country and generating annual profits measured in tens of billions (Rizvi, 2021). As consumers are becoming more conscious of sustainability and governmental efforts have been aimed at reducing the harmful impact of human activity on the planet, Coca-Cola has been experiencing growing pressure to take responsibility for global plastic pollution. For the company, there is a new goal to present itself as sustainable and responsible by implementing tangible change, however, the problem lies in the organization breaking its promises.
Non-Compliance Tactics
Coca-Cola’s history of not complying with its pledges to achieve sustainability in production is indicative of the company’s prioritizing profits and meeting demand. Notably, according to Conservation Law Foundation’s report, Big Beverage companies (e.g., Coca-Cola, Nestle, and PepsiCo) have perfected “a playbook of tactics to delay, distract, and derail recycling reform since the 1970s” (Pecci, 2022, para. 2). Breaking down these tactics will shed light on the unethical practices that beverage companies put in place. If to refer to Carrol’s pyramid of CSR (see Figure 1), it becomes evident that Coca-Cola does not meet the philanthropic and ethical responsibility categories. Through the avoidance tactics, companies, including Coca-Cola, abandoned the series of “green” and promised goals which they seemed never wanted to achieve in the first place, which makes them unethical and lacking philanthropic efforts.
The first tactic is blaming the consumer for the fact that a company does not implement sustainable practices. Besides implying that it is people who pollute the environment and should be the ones to stop pollution, Coca-Cola’s leadership mentioned that customers prefer plastic bottles and that the company is just there to meet their demand (Thomas, 2022). The need to accommodate customers is only an excuse because plastic pollution begins with companies that manufacture and distribute bottles and other containers.
The second tactic is lobbying to defeat Bottle Bills through misleading advertisement campaigns and astroturfing (disguising message sponsors). To ensure that legislation aimed at making beverage companies responsible for reducing pollution, they carefully coordinate public messaging, such as the Bottle Bill being a “solution in search of a problem” (Pecci et al., 2022). Because of the significant influence that brands have over public opinion, they are successful at promoting the message that the government exaggerates the problem. The third tactic is silencing support for implementing systematic change. To do so, Coca-Cola has collaborated with a complex framework of non-profits and NGOs that distributed small grants to underserved communities to pay for recycling, with strings attached (Pecci et al., 2022). The money paid to towns implies the promise of mayors to make minimal improvements in recycling programs and refrain from pushing for more comprehensive systems.
The fourth tactic is greenwashing, which entails making promises to improve and then breaking them. Every time there is increasing public pressure for improved brand sustainability or support for a Bottle Bill, Coca-Cola will publicize a new voluntary “green” initiative with some goals designed to deflect the outrage (Pecci et al., 2022). For example, the company spent millions of dollars on promoting innovation, saying that its bottles are made of 25% marine plastic, not to mention that Coca-Cola remains the most prominent plastic polluter (Laville, 2022). Another example was Coca-Cola’s commitment to “recycle or reuse 100% of the company’s PET plastic bottles in the US” at the time of the run-up to a national Bottle Bill proposal in 2007 (Pecci et al., 2022). However, none of the initiatives came to fruition after some time, which shows that the company made promises with the knowledge that they would never be fulfilled.
Governmental Efforts and Best Practices
Knowing what companies do to deflect the importance of recycling and restricting the use of plastic packaging, governmental efforts need to be stricter. Notably, the initial Bottle Bills have begun taking traction within the governmental actions around the 1970s (Pecci, 2022). For example, the bottle redemption program was put in place to place a fee on cans and bottles that people get back when they return them after consuming their drinks. Such programs are free to taxpayers because the manufacturers pay for the fees of handling to fund the system. Notably, Bottle Bills remain the most effective system that is currently available for recycling single-use plastic beverage containers. However, due to the resistance from Big Beverage companies, only ten states across America have Bottle Bills in place.
Best practices associated with more substantial Bottle Bills to enforce on manufacturers include better standards in the law, explicit performance targets, precise definitions, an expanded list of beverage containers, universal return to retail, and deposit values. Standards in the law mean that only state regulators and lawmakers should have the final authority to design the system of deposits within Bottle Bills (Pecci et al., 2022). The law should consider measures of transparency and penalties established for failing to reach the targets, while enforcement should be immediate and automatic. When it comes to the explicit targets, the laws should set aggressive and pre-defined performance targets as to redemption, post-consumer recycled products, recycling, as well as refill and reuse regulations. Establishing clear definitions within the laws will ensure that companies and consumers know what qualifies as recycling so that there is a limited framework that will not allow for greenwashing. Specifically, recycling should never include burning plastic to use as roadbed or landfill cover.
In addition to the mentioned best practices, Bottle Bills enforced by the government must include a specific and all-encompassing list of beverage containers embedded in the program, such as plastic, glass bottles, aluminum, and cans of up to three liters. Besides, cartons, pouches, and aseptic packaging should be included in the Bottle Bill if they can be recycled at the targeted rate (Pecci et al., 2022). When it comes to the deposit value best practices, it is recommended to be set at a minimum of ten cents per container. Within the law, a trigger automatically increasing the value of the deposit should be put in place if the rate of containers’ collection reaches below the predetermined level of 90% (Pecci et al., 2022). Moreover, due to inflation, deposit and handling fees should increase so that they remain large enough to incentivize consumers to return their recyclable packaging.
Circular Economy Considerations
At the core of circular economy is the implication that every part of a product’s journey must be carefully planned and implemented. The approach has been cited as one of the solutions to curbing and eliminating plastic pollution while offering climate, social, and economic advantages (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2022). It has been suggested that by 2040, a circular economy has the capacity to reduce the yearly volume of plastic polluting oceans by 80%, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35%, facilitate savings of around $200 billion annually, and create 700,000 net new jobs (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2022). Therefore, plastic bottles that Coca-Cola uses to package its products must become a part of the circular economy to eliminate the plastic pollution crisis.
To facilitate a shift toward an actual circular economy as related to plastic bottles that Coca-Cola manufactures, the first step entails reinventing the processes of packaging and sorting. The company should be held responsible for designing for its packaging to be reused and remade into new packaging, thus creating conditions conducive to sustainable practices. The collaboration between Coca-Cola and AMP Robotics could update and restructure the recycling process. AMP has designed robots to automate the manual sorting of plastic and glass bottles, aluminum cans, and other materials. As Artificial Intelligence drives the company’s systems, it will become much quicker and easier to facilitate sorting and recycling without compromising on the quality of operations.
Besides encouraging Coca-Cola to take accountability and responsibility for recycling its products, it is necessary that consumers become better informed about the choices they make in terms of packaging. The more customers start choosing sustainable and recyclable options, the more likely companies will have to align with the trend and adjust to customers’ needs accordingly. The expectation of sustainability makes a significant difference because economics has always been the limitation of recycling systems. However, when there is a solid end market that is willing to pay the price for sustainable materials, recycling efforts will become more effective and longer-standing.
Policies to drive change are essential to facilitate CSR among companies such as Coca-Cola because up to this day, Big Beverage has been avoiding major efforts aimed at environmental sustainability and accountability and have been engaging in greenwashing. Extended producer responsibility could push the company toward more tangible change as it will require managing end-of-lie processing for the products they manufacture while also making them easier for consumers to recycle. While companies can lead the change toward innovation, the individual efforts of consumers can play a significant role in the reduction of pollution.
Finally, collaboration across sectors is needed to facilitate a circular economy, such as the collaborative work between the private sector, NGOs, the community, and the government. Examples of existing partnerships include the Every Bottle Back initiative by the World Wildlife Fund, the American Beverage Association, the Recycling Partnership, and Closed Loop Partners. The initiative aims to support community recycling efforts, putting $100 million into upgrading collection, processing, and recycling facilities (Nunez, 2021). To date, the program yielded more than 600 million new pounds of recycled PET (Nunez, 2021). A benefit for Coca-Cola to engage in such a program entails showing responsibility and meeting actual results based on the established goals instead of avoiding accountability for producing billions of bottles and not doing much to decrease their environmental impact.
Conclusion
To conclude, there are positive initiatives, programs, and legislations aimed at making producers accountable for manufacturing plastic packaging. However, Coca-Cola and its fellow Big Beverage companies do not care enough about the importance of Bottle Bills because single-use plastic continues to bring high profits. The publicized initiatives to take responsibility to turn out to be greenwashing, with preventive solutions not being well-documented. Therefore, it is imperative that Coca-Cola reconsiders its approach toward CSR because it has remained the largest plastic bottle polluter worldwide. The future lies with modern and detailed Bottle Bills that encourage the use of reusable containers, and it is necessary to move with this trend. Today, there are new elaborate technologies such as AI-powered robots that help make sorting and processing more efficient. Thus, there is no excuse that Coca-Cola can make to avoid recycling its packaging or introduce more sustainable options to its consumers because the resources that the company possesses are quite extensive and can make an impact.
Reference List
Carroll’s pyramid of CSR (2019).
Ellen Macarthur Foundation. (2022) Plastics.
Garg, M. (2022) Big brands like Coca Cola found guilty of ‘greenwashing’, what is this and why is it problematic?
Laville, S. (2022) ‘Coca-Cola among brands greenwashing over packaging, report says’, The Guardian.
Lindwall, C. (2020) Single-use plastics 101.
Nunez, C. (2021) Four key ideas to building a circular economy for plastics.
Pecci, K. (2022) 5 ways big beverage sabotages recycling reform.
Pecci, K. L., Blair, P. W., and Budris, K. (2022) ‘The Big Beverage playbook for avoiding responsibility’, CLF.
Plastic Soup Foundation. (2022) Is Coca-Cola’s latest promise really a step forward?
Rizvi, A. (2021) Here is how Coca-Cola is contributing to the plastic problem around the world.
Thomas, D. (2020) ‘Davos 2020: People still want plastic bottles, says Coca-Cola’, BBC. Web.