Is Coke Finally Getting The Message?
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Its week two of our global push to get Coca Cola to stop choking our oceans. In this new push, we are joined by Greenpeace offices from across five continents and are calling on Coke’s global CEO to reduce their plastic footprint. This campaign comes on the heels of us revealing that despite Coke claiming to take ocean plastic pollution seriously, they have in fact produced even more single use plastic bottles – now up to 110 billion a year or 3,400 a second.
Many of you have heeded our call and have signed our petition. We managed to get over 130,000 signatures in our first week! Great work everyone!!! And thanks to you, it looks like Coke is starting to get the message.
This week they announced a trial scheme at the University of Reading. Students there will be given refillable bottles. They can then use these bottles at smart fountain dispensers around campus to get a variety of Coke related products. This is the type of innovation that we are hoping to see Coca Cola roll out globally. It’s smart, inventive and reduces the amount of plastic bottles that they produce. Coke, can we have more of this and less throwaway plastic please?
But the fight is far from over. Last week they announced that they have now taken the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Our Ocean’s pledge and aim to have all of their primary packaging 100% recyclable by 2025.
It’s good the Coca Cola are now working to ensure all of their products are 100% recyclable. But 8 years is an incredibly long time to achieve this goal. Especially when you consider that up to 12 million tonnes of plastic enter our oceans every year. That means by the time Coca-Cola have achieved this goal, almost 80 million tonnes of additional plastic will have polluted the sea.
The bigger issue with this announcement is that they are still not taking responsibility for the harm that their bottles are doing. Yes, people should recycle their plastic bottles. But companies also have to be responsible for the end life of their products. Nothing that we use for 5 minutes should pollute our environment for hundreds of years.
This is why we need Coke to commit to dramatically reducing their plastic footprint. They can not continue to produce billions of single use plastic bottles year after year. Instead, they need to invest in reusable packaging and develop new innovative delivery systems.
So let’s keep up the pressure! If you haven’t already, please sign our new petition. And if you have signed our petition, share it with your friends and family. We all need to do our part to end ocean plastics and that includes holding drink’s companies like Coca-Cola to account over their single use plastic bottle production.
About Tisha Brown
I am a campaigner on the oceans team.