This story starts in one of the most populous cities
in Tanzania: Dar Es Salaam. In the middle of the city there lies a shining blue mountain.
But this mountain is not built of rock and dirt. It's built of plastic bottles. A huge
pile of plastic bottles that grows upwards towards the clouds. And up those steep slopes
walk workers lugging bags of even more plastic weighing over 70 kilograms. Today, we’re
going to look at the environmental impact of Coca-Cola, its use of plastic, water, and
figure out how that all ties back to this plastic mountain in Dar Es Salaam.
In May of 1886, pharmacist John Pemberton wanted to try something a little different.
He decided to combine a newly concocted syrup recipe with the bubbly texture of carbonated
water. For the patrons of Pemberton’s pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, the recipe was a hit,
but it wasn’t until a shrewd businessman named Asa Candler bought the secret formula
that Coke truly became a phenomenon. Candler aggressively marketed the Coca-Cola syrup
to pharmacies and soda fountains throughout the Atlanta area, and soon the brand began
its climb to dominance. Alongside savvy marketing, Coca-cola did one other thing that made it
so successful: it kept distribution costs low by tapping into local water sources. At
first, the company only sold syrup, so soda fountains would have to use their own carbonated
water, but as the company dove into the bottled soda industry the factories began to draw
heavily from the local watersheds. So, Coke is not only a soda company but also a water
company. And the drain the Coca-Cola brand puts on local water supplies is substantial.
Let’s zoom in to India, where Coke runs 58 bottling facilities. Out of just one of
those factories, Coke typically produces around 860,000 bottles per day, and according to
a third-party assessment of Coke in 2010, to make one half-liter bottle of Coke the
company uses 150 to 300 liters of water. 99.8% of this water footprint comes from supply
chain ingredients, like water-intensive sugar cane. The actual water used in the production
process is roughly 1.9 liters. But for Coke, which relies on local supply chains for ingredients,
their bottling facility’s footprint can be devastating for the surrounding communities.
Indeed, in 2004, Coca-Cola was ordered to shut a bottling facility in Kerala, India
because it was sucking up too much groundwater. And again in 2014, another Coke factory in
Varanasi was forced to close after local farmers and community members rose up and drew attention
to the facility’s drain on local aquifers. And once again, in 2016, India’s Central
Pollution Control Board found a Coke plant in Hapur in violation of multiple environmental
regulations, including discharging wastewater into a pond local farmers used for irrigation,
not using sewage treatment plants, and using polluting boilers and diesel generators. In
short, Coke has had a track record among its bottling sites of draining and polluting watersheds
to produce as much product as possible.
In 2020, however, Coke claims things are different. It’s now claiming that it replenishes 100%
of the water it uses to create its beverages back to local systems. But according to an
investigative report from The Verge, this is just greenwashing. Much like carbon offsets,
Coke is just investing in water projects to achieve a water neutral impact. Essentially,
Coke is doing some work to make its water impact more efficient, but they are, on the
whole, continuing with business as usual. They invest in sanitation and well-digging
projects in rural areas as well as support water conservation nonprofits to disguise
their dismal history of water-use. To add insult to injury, some of these Coke-funded
projects cause more harm than good, like the digging of irrigation trenches in National
Parks in Mexico to improve growing conditions for saplings. Even though scientific studies
as well as the Mexican government’s forestry commission, “concluded the practice did
not improve growing conditions, but it did increase erosion and forest degradation.”
But for Coke, water-use is just one part of the problem.
Coca-Cola is the leading beverage provider around the world. It sells 1.9 billion drinks
every single day. And almost all of those beverages are wrapped up in plastic. Because
Coke has a plastic problem. But that wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1950s, Coke bottles
were made of glass: “In the 1950s when coke was dispensed in glass bottles they had a
self-imposed deposit of 40 cents. Coke wanted their expensive glass bottles back so they
could reuse them.” Essentially, before the introduction of cheap plastic, Coke was the
one that had to deal with their trash--not the consumer. As a result, they used durable,
reusable glass bottles that could be used time and time again to cut down on the costs
of bottling. Fast forward to today and plastic bottles are now synonymous with the Coca-Cola
brand. Indeed, Coke recently admitted to producing over 3 million metric tonnes of plastic every
single year. An article from The Guardian calculates that that’s the equivalent of
creating 200,000 plastic bottles every minute. Although Coke’s plastic is made from an
easily recycled PET plastic, most Coke bottles don't end up in the recycling bin. An audit
that looked at thousands of pieces of ocean trash found that Coke was the most polluting
brand in 2018 and 2019. So with its transition away from glass, Coke moved the burden from
the company onto individuals, requiring consumers to do much of the work of ocean clean-up and
recycling. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the infamous and highly problematic crying
Native American commercial calling on the public to recycle was released around the
same time beverage companies began churning out plastic bottles in the U.S. The commercial,
as it would later turn out, was sponsored by several bottling manufacturers including
Coke. In short, beginning in the 1970s, Coke embraced cheaper production at the expense
of surrounding communities, environments, and whole oceans.
Which is exactly what has happened in Dar Es Salaam over the last seven years. Back
in the Tanzanian city, the plastic mountain is still piled high, all because beverage
producers like the Coke factory nearby, switched from a glass bottle deposit system to the
“recyclable” plastic model. An investigative documentary by Java Films visited one of the
four Coke factories in Tanzania, which up until 7 years ago, only produced glass bottles.
The glass bottles were more expensive to buy, but once you returned them to the Coke factory,
you would receive your deposit back. In 2013, however, the Coca-Cola facility switched almost
all of their beverages over to plastic bottles, much as they did in the U.S. during the 1970s.
The result has been excessive plastic pollution and the arrival of a gruesome poverty economy
centered around recycling. People search through piles of trash on beaches and landfills often
cutting themselves on sharp metal or syringes, all to collect the PET bottles that Coke churns
out. After hours of enduring this harsh labor, these pickers then hand over their finds for
meager pay. And many of those bottles make it to that mountain of plastic, which happens
to be a recycling collection and sorting facility. There workers must make the perilous trek
up that ever-growing plastic mountain because the recycling industry is crumbling. Specifically,
China has recently stopped accepting foreign recyclable goods, and now there’s nowhere
for that plastic mountain in Dar Es Salaam to go. It’s turning into trash. So, Coca-cola
did away with a system of reuse that according to a Coke commissioned environmental assessment
was the most ecologically sound, and instead embraced a system of plastic that indiscriminately
pollutes the environment and places the cost and burden of clean-up onto individuals.
But wait, isn’t Coke running a campaign called “A World Without Waste?” Aren’t
they engaging in environmental campaigns and working towards goals for the better? Yes,
and this is a classic example of how Corporate Social Responsibility allows companies to
distract consumers from the real damage they’re doing. Yes, Coke is sponsoring ocean clean-up
non-profits and investing in “plant-based” bottling plastics, but this greenwashes the
fact that if Coke had not switched from a glass deposit system the problem would exist.
Indeed, Coke has consistently lobbied against deposit systems for decades, because as the
author of the book Citizen Coke explains, “because it means higher cost for them and
in the end, this was a way of forcing them to internalize their pollution.” In addition,
the investigative report from The Verge notes that “Coke has spent tens of millions of
dollars on water efficiency and access projects in partnerships with groups ranging from the
UN Development Program to the US Agency for International Development, making it a darling
of the organizations that track corporate citizenship.” Essentially, Coke is causing
a mortal wound on the Earth, then is turning around and offering to patch it up with some
band-aids, and then using their $4 billion annual marketing budget is trying to make
it look like they're saving the environment. In this way, Coca-cola reveals the various
ways that multinationals in a neoliberal capitalist economy seek growth at all costs, but then
turn around and market themselves as good samaritans cleaning up the problems that they
themselves created. Coca-cola, will never be the one to solve plastic pollution and
water scarcity. But there are real solutions to these problems like glass deposit systems,
and they’re effective because they address the problem at the source.
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