Coca-Cola Named Most Polluting Brand in Global Audit of Plastic Waste

Coca-Cola found for the second year in a row to be the most polluting brand in a global audit of plastic trash conducted by the Break Free From Plastic global movement.

As being reported, the environmental group engaged 72,541 volunteers in 51 countries to collect plastic waste in September, and 43 percent of what they had found were clearly marked consumer brands.

These volunteers collected trash from beaches, paddled along waterways, and walked along streets near their offices and homes picking up plastic bottles, cups, wrappers, bags, and scraps for the one-day cleanup was the basis for the audit.

After sorting through the mounds of garbage, what they found was the plastic that represented 50 different types and could be traced back to almost 8,000 brands.

Coke was responsible for 11,732 pieces of plastic litter found in 37 countries on four continents, with almost 12,000 Coca-Cola products found in 37 countries across the world, followed by Nestlé and Pepsico.

That has left Coke named as the top source in Africa and Europe, in the US, Nestle was the biggest producer of plastic pollution. Solo Cup Company and Starbucks came on Nos. 2 and 3.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Heineken was the third-largest plastic polluter.

Coca-Cola while responding to questions about the brand audit with an emailed statement, said, “Any time our packaging ends up in our oceans — or anywhere that it doesn’t belong — is unacceptable to us. In partnership with others, we are working to address this critical global issue, both to help turn off the tap in terms of plastic waste entering our oceans and to help clean up the existing pollution.”

“We are investing locally in every market to increase recovery of our bottles and cans and recently announced the launch in Vietnam of an industry-backed packaging recovery organization, as well as a bottler-led investment of $19 million in the Philippines in a new food-grade recycling facility.

We are also investing to accelerate key innovations that will help to reduce waste, including new enhanced recycling technologies that allow us to recycle poor quality PET plastic, often destined for incineration or landfill, back to high-quality food packaging material”, Coke’s statement further added.