Coca-Cola's ‘masterclass in greenwashing’ shows corporates can’t be relied on

It's been called a "masterclass in greenwashing" – and I'm finding it hard to disagree.

At the back end of last year, Coca-Cola quietly deleted their 2022 pledge to have 25 per cent of drinks in refillable or returnable bottles by 2030. At the same time, they've downgraded their recycled material target from 50 per cent to 35-40 per cent.

There was plenty of fanfare around the targets when they were first announced, so it’s quite telling how they’ve now been stealthily removed. They simply deleted the webpage and hoped nobody would notice. No press release, no explanation, no accountability. To me, this isn’t the actions of a company that genuinely cares.

In fact, it’s straight out of the greenwashing playbook:

• Make a bold sustainability pledge
• Collect the accolades for being a responsible company that cares about the planet.
• Take limited action on the pledge
• Discreetly forget about the pledge a couple of years later
• Repeat

Coca-Cola’s plastic impact

This would be a concerning way to go about sustainability for any company, but Coca-Cola isn't just any company – they're the world's biggest plastic polluter.

For six consecutive years, they've been named the 'World's Worst Plastic Polluter' in global brand audits conducted by Break Free From Plastic. In 2023 alone, volunteers across 41 countries collected and documented 33,820 pieces of Coca-Cola plastic waste – the highest tally since the project started.

The scale is quite mind-blowing. In 2023, the Coca-Cola company used around 3.45 million metric tonnes of plastic packaging. That’s around 200,000 plastic bottles being produced every minute!

Even by the high ‘standards’ of other corporate behemoths, this is a lot. In 2023, Nestle produced around 900,000 metric tonnes of plastic packaging, Unilever 700,000 tonnes and Colgate-Palmolive 270,000 metric tonnes.

Their timing is particularly telling. Their backtracking on plastic targets came at the same time as UN member states failed to reach agreement at the plastic treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea.

The global treaty would have been the first-ever legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution, but negotiations stalled with the oil producing companies over targets to reduce primary plastic production and restrictions on chemicals of concern. Negotiations will continue in 2025.

Instead of their original commitments, they're now aiming for weaker targets with longer timelines. The company's new, watered-down policy makes promises to "increase recycled plastic use to 30-35 per cent globally" and "help ensure the collection of 70-75 per cent of bottles and cans" – but not until 2035, pushing the timeline back five years.

Most tellingly, they've completely abandoned their commitment to reduce virgin plastic by 3 million metric tonnes.

According to Oceana, if Coca-Cola had met its commitment to reach 25 per cent reusable packaging by 2030 (up from its current 14 per cent), they could have avoided producing the equivalent of over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles and cups. Their analysis suggests this would prevent around 8.5 to 14.7 billion plastic bottles and cups from reaching our waterways and seas.

It’s fair to say the backtracking on these targets will be disastrous for our oceans and natural environment.

The wider picture on recycling

Recycling targets are useful and will certainly have to play a part in lessening plastic’s impact, but it’s not the full solution. It's the sheer volume of plastic that needs to be reduced.

You can't recycle your way out of hundreds of billions of bottles a year – especially when recycling often involves downcycling materials into products that ultimately end up as waste anyway. Plastic can only be recycled a few times before quality deterioration makes it unusable. This is unlike glass or aluminium which can be recycled infinitely.

Many people argue that it's the consumers' responsibility to dispose of bottles properly. On the one hand this is true. People should not be littering with plastic bottles. However, this framing conveniently shifts attention away from the producers flooding the market with single-use plastics by the billions in the first place.

Coca-Cola has created a highly desirable, some might say addictive, product delivered in packaging designed to be used once and discarded. They've created this monster, and extended producer responsibility principles suggest they should bear the burden of managing it.

I've no doubt there are many good people working at Coca-Cola with genuine intentions for sustainability. But ultimately, it's the executives who call the shots, and there's only one thing that matters at that level: money. Fossil fuel companies profit from virgin plastic production, recycling companies profit from processing it and Coca-Cola profits from using the cheapest packaging option available.

We can't rely on big corporations to 'do the right thing' voluntarily. Without mandatory extended producer responsibility legislation that holds companies accountable for the full lifecycle of their products, these corporate sustainability pledges will continue to be disposable PR exercises – as easily discarded as the billions of plastic bottles they produce.

Ben Hardman is the founder of Tiny Eco, a UK-based media site dedicated to green homes and sustainable living. Through expert content and the Green Business Hub, he helps connect eco-conscious consumers with businesses and ideas to have a more positive impact.