Fizzy Truths

Credit: The Coca-Cola Company

By Sakshi Vaya

It’s a hot afternoon on the U. of I. campus. As I step out of class and head toward the Illini Union, the five-minute walk feels like three miles in the sun. Thirsty, I go straight for the vending machine and get a bottle of classic Coca-Cola. There are few things as refreshing as this sugary fizzy drink in the summer, and billions of people from over 200 countries in the world agree with me.

The trouble starts when I throw the empty plastic bottle draped in familiar red into the recycling bin, feeling good about myself for just a moment. I thought I had chosen the sustainable option.

Most of us have come to believe that recycling is sustainable, thanks to recycling campaigns all around us. But the truth is much more complicated. The bottle I just threw into the recycling bin has less than a 50% chance of being recycled. It’s more likely to end up in a landfill or the bottom of the ocean. If someone else decides to dump a bunch of food in the same bin that I used, the trash bag will be discarded due to contamination. And if the bottle does make it to the sorting belt and gets handpicked by the overworked and underpaid worker at the waste station, this type of plastic can be recycled only a couple of times before the polymer becomes too weak to be recycled again.

Unlike metal or glass, plastic is not infinitely recyclable. Even when we successfully “recycle” a Coca-Cola bottle, we’re only saving a fraction of virgin plastic that will need to be extracted for the next bottle produced.

I’m talking about Coca-Cola specifically because I’m surrounded by it. Like 63 other U.S. universities, the U. of I. has sold something called “pouring rights” to Coca-Cola in exchange for a percentage profit on all sales on campus. “Every single beverage that is sold on this campus must be Coca-Cola,” says Daphne Hulse, the university’s Zero Waste Coordinator.

Every vending machine, dining hall, and university-owned convenience store is contractually bound to sell Coca-Cola beverages only, making these bottles a significant component of the waste stream, and a major sustainability concern. But of course, the world’s largest beverage company cannot be seen as an enemy of the Earth. Not if their well-marketed sustainability campaigns have any say, at least. Coca-Cola has been involved with campus sustainability at the university for the last five years.

“There is money set aside by Coca-Cola for supporting sustainability initiatives; $10,000 per year,” says Jennifer Fraterrigo, Associate Director for Campus Sustainability. Funding recycling campaigns on campus and branding recycling bins on game days with the company logo sure works to trick people into seeing the green side of the beverage company. What few fans realize are the actual numbers on how much plastic is saved.

In her monthly meetings with Coke representatives about campus sustainability, Hulse has voiced her concerns about the company’s focus on recycling alone as a sustainable waste management solution. She explained to me that their efforts need to focus more broadly on reducing, reusing, and repurposing items, so that they don’t end up in the waste stream in the first place. “Recycling is always the last resort.”

Hulse is not alone. People around the world are beginning to question the promises made by their beloved beverage brand. Coca-Cola runs many sustainability campaigns in its markets across the globe, like “World Without Waste,” which promote and promise the recycling of their bottles and cans.

In its 2022 Business and Sustainability Report, Coca-Cola claims that 90% of its packaging globally is recyclable. That’s a tall claim. In simple words, being “recyclable” means an item can be broken down and remolded into another. This depends on not just the material, but also the existence of infrastructure and systems that make this “recycling” happen. There’s a significant hole in Coca-Cola’s claim — its material is recyclable, but most countries that the company sells in don’t have waste management infrastructure that allows for recycling. The “recyclability” of the packaging does not translate into the circularity of their economy.

One might wonder why a beverage company needs to make any sustainability claims at all. The answer is ESG reporting: the mandated annual public disclosure of information relevant to three sustainability criteria — termed “Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance.” In theory, these reports allow companies to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, thus attracting more investors.

However, no one ensures that a company doesn’t lie or misrepresent data in order to paint a more sustainable picture of the brand. To quote an article from Harvard Business Review, “reporting is not a proxy for progress. Measurement is often nonstandard, incomplete, imprecise, and misleading.”

On one hand, Coca-Cola claims that it collects back and recycles 61% of all bottles and cans that it introduces in the market. On the other hand, Coca-Cola has been ranked as the world’s number one plastic polluter brand for three consecutive years, according to Break Free from Plastic’s global brand audit report. This is only one example of the many contradictions that exist between Coca-Cola’s sustainability self-reporting and the findings from news sources and global agencies regarding the company’s environmental impact.

In June 2021, Coca-Cola was sued by the Earth Island Institute, a non-profit, for deceptive marketing regarding its sustainability efforts. More recently, in November 2023, a legal complaint was issued by a consumer body and two environmental groups to the European Commission over Coca-Cola’s greenwashing, according to a BBC article.

“A ‘100%’ recycling rate for bottles is technically not possible and, just because bottles are made with recycled plastic, does not mean they don’t harm people and the planet,” Rosa Pritchard, a plastics lawyer at ClientEarth, told BBC. “It is important companies don’t portray recycling as a silver bullet to the plastic crisis. Instead they need to focus efforts on reducing plastic at [the] source.”

Coca-Cola has been acquitted time and again from greenwashing lawsuits in the U.S. and Europe, on the grounds that its claims “were merely general and aspirational goals.”

The Center for Climate Integrity has released a report titled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” which discusses in detail how most plastics can never be recycled. Plastic recycling as a sustainable solution is a false hope, it explains: “The plastics industry has deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.”

Coca-Cola chooses to continue selling its drinks primarily in plastic packaging. It chooses to not invest in finding sustainable alternatives to the type 1 plastic bottles, such as reusable bottles, returnable schemes, open dispensing stations, or even a complete shift to metal containers that can be infinitely recycled. Instead, it continues to extract petroleum to fulfill the requirement of virgin plastic. Hundreds of court cases and climate protests later, the company still refuses to make any changes that could cause the slightest dent in its fast-climbing revenues.

Rather, it uses its money to run campaigns to tell you, the consumer, that climate change is in your hands, so you must throw those bottles in recycling bins. The company tells you that the choice to change is yours when it has made the more relevant choices already. The corporate messaging distracts you, and when the climate worsens and plastic pollution increases, you do not blame Coca-Cola, you blame yourself.

Many argue that we don’t need Coca-Cola in the first place — the carbonated sugar is bad for humans, the environment, and not a necessary product by any means. “So, let’s shut down the industry itself, instead of debating over plastics and recycling,” a passionate friend suggested to me.

That is not only controversial, but also a sadly misinformed argument. When you hear “Coca-Cola,” you envision a clear plastic bottle with a bright red label. However, that is only one of 3,500 different beverages that the company sells across 200+ countries!

Popular coffee and tea brands like Costa Coffee and Georgia are owned by Coca-Cola. If you drink fruit juices from Minute Maid or Simply, you are drinking from a Coca-Cola bottle. From Powerade to Topo Chico Hard Seltzer, the company bottles a wild variety of drinks. In fact, even if the only bottled liquid you consume is water, it would be hard to avoid Coca-Cola’s plastic! Aquarius, Dasani, and Smartwater are all part of the same family.

Hulse shared with me that “Coca-Cola sells significantly more bottled water on campus than soft drinks.” In the United States, the company makes a total of $10 billion to $12 billion in yearly revenue, of which over a billion dollars comes from the bottled water brand Dasani alone. This wide range of brands and products ties Coca-Cola to billions of people worldwide.

The choices made in the offices of one company impact everyone — from consumers falling prey to greenwashed marketing, to the low-income communities in South Asia and Africa dealing with massive amounts of plastic waste, to fish in the Atlantic Ocean choking on bottle caps. The company that has made itself a global symbol of refreshment and happiness has also become the reason why a kid in Bangladesh walks barefoot in a landfill to collect plastic bottles that can be sold to scrap dealers for a small profit.

Ironically enough, in the face of these impacts, Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s most sustainable beverage company in 2023, for the seventh time, by S&P Global’s Dow Jones Sustainability Indices, which is considered one of the world’s leading sustainability benchmarks. It seems it’s possible to be the most sustainable company and the biggest plastic polluter at the same time, if you can just display your wares from the right angle to the right people.

Marketing itself as an eco-friendly company, Coca-Cola’s sustainability report boasts successful initiatives across all realms — water, climate, waste, agriculture, and global communities. James Quincey, Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, notes in the very beginning of the company’s ESG report that the strategy seeks “to respond to current and future challenges, while creating positive change for the planet.” Conveniently, this comment leaves out the part about also manufacturing and perpetuating the said challenges.

The problem is not just exaggeration in marketing. Greenwashing is not as mild a problem as the word itself might sound. As University of Colorado Professor Ellis Jones remarks in his interview with WUSA, “It’s basically just a form of lying . . . It means that [consumers] spend money that they otherwise wouldn’t have spent, because they believe something [sustainable] is being done when it’s not being done. What makes it harmful at a very core level is that it’s a distortion of what is actually happening in the world.”

We’ve been lied to for so long, corporate greenwashing is no longer an exception but an expectation. Think about that the next time you toss your favorite bottled beverage in the recycling bin. If a brand sells you cloth marketed as pure silk, and you later find out it is actually made of rayon or fake silk, that would be considered a lie, not error. You’d feel deceived, cheated, and would hold the brand accountable for false marketing.

But when a brand uses misleading advertisements and false claims on its packaging to tell you that it cares about environmental issues, and that by buying its product you would not be causing any environmental harm, we tend to not view it as a lie. Even when faced with reports and data suggesting that said company is making false claims, more people are likely to consider it an error, slight exaggeration, or even a work in progress, saying “their claims might not be 100% true right now, but they’re working on it.”

In fact, that is exactly how Coca-Cola responded to the complaint made to the European Commission about its greenwashing practices — “[we are] working to reduce the amount of plastic packaging we use.”

Consumers like us are conditioned to be satisfied with such “work-in-progress,” happy with the idea that companies are at least doing the bare minimum. This lenient forgiveness from the masses is what gives them the liberty to claim results they haven’t achieved, to promise measures they haven’t planned, and to market sustainability as an ad campaign.

We allow brands to lie.

We are in a toxic relationship with corporations, stuck in a cycle where we realize that they cause harm, we raise voices, stage protests, and then they promise amends. They promise to be better, to create positive change, and we believe them, like we believed them the last 26 times. It is hard to break out of toxic relationships.

As part of the Don’t Waste campaign, Coca-cola is providing portable receptacles for recyclables and landfill waste. Look for these bins at Illini games and major campus events. Credit: Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) and Facilities & Services (F&S) partner with Coca-Cola for many initiatives at the U. of I., like the “Don’t Waste” campaign, which aims to recycle all plastic bottles and metal cans used on campus, or the “Zero Waste Illini Games” where Coca-Cola provides massive recycling bins, well-branded with its logo, for bottles and cans at athletic events. Coca-Cola gets to have a bigger say (since it funds the initiatives) in designing the campaigns, likely resulting in many initiatives being focused on recycling waste instead of reducing it.

As an Environmental Sustainability major, and an intern in the Zero Waste team at F&S, I help organize many zero waste-related events at the university. The organizing team wears Coke sponsored green t-shirts, both to be identifiable and to symbolize the campaign.

It makes one feel incredibly conflicted — actively working toward addressing a problem created by Coca-Cola, while wearing the brand on your back.

As part of my job, I design presentations for collaborations between Coke and campus sustainability, and I also visit the Waste Transfer Station where thousands of Coca-Cola bottles come in from campus each day. I attend monthly meetings with my team and Coca-Cola representatives to discuss ways to increase recycling, and I also set up educational stalls telling people how a plastic bottle can only be recycled a handful of times.

This dilemma, combined with a personal liking for fizzy drinks wrapped in signature red, puts me in the unfortunate position where I’m funding the problem, working in collaboration with the creator of the problem, criticizing the problem, and trying to solve the problem. It’s exhausting.

But this dilemma is not unique to me. All environmentally conscious consumers stand at the same intersection, debating the longer-than-life debate of who’s responsible for making a change — corporations or consumers.

So, as the bottle that I threw in the recycling bin at the Illini Union makes its way along the cycle of waste, I type words into this article as an attempt to conclude this debate. When over 2 billion consumers stand on one side and a single corporation on the other, trying to ascertain which party should make the necessary change, it only takes kindergarten math to see that one decision is easier than 2 billion. One decision is faster than 2 billion. One decision is more possible, more logical, more practical. One corporation impacting billions is more accountable than billions impacting one corporation. Coca-Cola is responsible.

About the Author …

Sakshi Vaya graduated from the University of Illinois in May 2024, with a B.S. in Earth, Society, and Environmental Sustainability, and the Certificate in Environmental Writing. She is the Founder-Director of Jeevatva, a waste-management startup in India. Currently, she’s pursuing her master’s in Environmental Engineering, focusing on Carbon Neutrality, at the University of Seoul, South Korea. 

This piece was written for ESE 498, the CEW capstone course, in Spring 2024.