Raw Materials and Production
Share a Coke with Natural Resources:
The production process for Coca-Cola bottles includes procurement of raw materials and recycling old bottles. We are not able to connect all the raw materials Coca-Cola uses in its bottle to certain places. For instance, the company doesn’t refer to a location of their petroleum stock, but we do know their plastic bottles are manufactured using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic – 25% recycled and 75% virgin PET.
As a result of the social movements by groups such as Greenpeace, Coca-Cola is now working toward becoming more sustainable in their production by reducing its harsh impacts on the environment both in obtaining raw materials and manufacturing the bottles. Coca-Cola currently ensures that some of the raw materials in their packaging comes from renewable sources, such as Plant-PET, made from vegetable material (Coca-Cola 2016).
In certain countries, they use more than 25 percent recycled materials, and they already sell a plastic bottle made from 100 percent recycled material in three countries (Quincey 2018). Coca-Cola also created the world’s first fully-recyclable PET plastic bottle, called the PlantBottle. These plastic bottles are now being made with material from sugar cane and other plant matter, avoiding a large amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the creation process. They even made a collective decision to share their PlantBottle technology with other big companies in efforts to reduce their overall impacts, while still looking for ways to advance these technologies (Quincey 2018).
While these inventions and the crosspollination of recyclable plastic formulas allow Coke to take steps in the right direction in terms of recycling, these achievements cannot overshadow the problems that still exist in the company’s bottle manufacturing. After all, a majority of bottles being manufactured are being done in the traditional PET formula, which means 75% of the all bottles require the production of new plastic materials. In order to make new plastics the company still needs to use raw materials and natural resources such as palm oil and petroleum.
In turn, Coca-Cola is contributing to the driving forces that lead to rapid deforestation practices that palm oil farmers, in countries like Malaysia, use to keep up with and capitalize on the high demand for their product. We see the same trope occur even in their “more sustainable” bottles such as the PlantBottle, which drives sugar cane farmers to similar practices. Their continuous and insatiable need for non-renewable resources like petroleum also pose a well-known threat to the current state of the environment as a result of overuse and limited quantity.
Share a Coke with the Bottling Plants:
The working conditions at Coca-Cola bottlers and bottle manufacturers throughout the world vary; this is because the Coca-Cola Company often works with factory franchises in several countries that each has its own civil rights and working condition laws.
“By strategically investing in select bottling operations, temporarily taking them under Coca-Cola ownership, and utilizing the leadership and resources of The Coca-Cola Company, BIG [a part of Coca-Cola’s World without Waste Initiative] can drive long-term growth in critical markets and address major structural […] challenges” (The Coca-Cola Company 2012).
All of the selected bottling programs are often located in countries such as India and the Philippines, where “structural challenges” manifest in ways such as poor working conditions. In December of 2017, the company took their BIG commitment a step further by updating their internal Human Rights Code as they “aim to address these salient human rights risks in a comprehensive manner in an effort to help ensure that the company does not cause or contribute to adverse human rights impacts, wherever we operate” (The Coca-Cola Company 2017). While policy changes like these look like victories on paper, the lived experience of the impacted communities are minimally affected.
Of course, addressing issues inside of company affiliated locations is a progressive step to alleviating the social problem of worker exploitation; however, these changes fail to address other keys issues such as the disproportionately low pay wages that allow the company’s profit margins to soar. Because of this some would say the corporation is using these changes as a tactic to distract from other, much more problematic issues that their bottling factories cause in these areas.
A prime example being the failure to address that they have, “been accused of dehydrating communities in its pursuit of water resources to feed its own plants, drying up farmers' wells and destroying local agriculture” (War on Want 2015). Here one can see the conflict of a global culture come to fruition as this is a culminating example of how the company must battle the constant struggle between making a profit margin large enough to sustain a universal empire or invest in limiting their ecological and ethical guidelines to appease the small yet powerful minorities that speak against their brand.