After 2 years, Coca-Cola’s promise to scale up reusable packaging is dead

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

Despite growing public scrutiny and legal challenges over its use of plastic, Coca-Cola appears to be moving backward on packaging sustainability.

Earlier this decade, the soda giant publicly pledged to decrease its use of virgin plastic and boost the share of its beverages sold in reusable containers. But in a blog post last week, the company quietly dropped those targets. Coca-Cola’s “evolved” plastics strategy now seems to rest almost entirely on cleaning up existing plastic waste and recycling — though its recycling targets are now weaker than they were before.

“We remain committed to building long-term business resilience and earning our social license to operate,” the company’s executive vice president for sustainability, Bea Perez, said in a statement.

Coke’s announcement is part of a broader trend of companies walking back or falling short of their plastics sustainability targets. Last month, a progress report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation — a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” in which resources are conserved — showed that hundreds of companies had collectively fallen short of the progress needed to meet a range of voluntary plastics commitments by 2025.

The companies pledged to cut virgin plastic use by 18 percent below 2018 values, but have only achieved a 3 percent reduction as of 2023. They said they would totally eliminate polyvinyl chloride — a type of plastic suspected of leaching hazardous chemicals — but have only used 1 percent less by weight. They promised to increase the amount of reusable packaging they offered, but have made no progress toward that goal.

Sam Pearse, plastics campaign manager for the nonprofit Story of Stuff — which advocates for reusable alternatives to single-use plastics — said the trend suggests companies aren’t serious about their plastics targets. A pledge is “this thing they might try to do if the stars align … but it’s not core to the business operation.

“Once you start seeing that cycle a number of times, it’s hard to not be skeptical about the intention,” he added.

Coca-Cola is one of the largest food and beverage companies on the planet. It sells products in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide (there are only 195 United Nations-recognized countries) and last year made $46 billion in net revenue. In addition to its eponymous soda, the company also makes Dasani bottled water, Fanta sodas, and Sprite, as well as some 200 other food and beverage brands.

Coca-Cola also makes a lot of plastic packaging: about 3.5 million metric tons of it per year, almost entirely out of fossil fuels. Much of this plastic ends up in the environment. For six years running, Coca-Cola has been named the “top global plastic polluter,” based on beach cleanups coordinated by the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic. Last year, volunteers collected some 500,000 pieces of plastic trash and identified Coca-Cola branding on about 33,000 of them, spread out across 40 countries. 

“In each one of the cleanups that we organize — not only beach cleanups but in mangroves, rivers, mountains, and volcanoes — we find Coca-Cola bottles,” said Cecilia Torres, the director of an Ecuadorian ocean protection nonprofit called Mingas por el Mar, which participates in Break Free From Plastic’s global brand audit. She said Coca-Cola’s plastics are even reaching the remote Galápagos Islands, where they may be introducing invasive species.

Scientists and advocates say that replacing single-use plastics with reusable alternatives and capping virgin plastic production are two of the best ways to reduce plastic-related emissions and pollution. ​​If reuse offset the need for just 10 percent of single-use plastic consumption, research suggests it could halve the amount of waste reaching the ocean. Meanwhile, scientists say capping virgin plastic production is the most straightforward way of reducing plastic pollution — and potentially more desirable than trying to boost the recycling rate, because recycled plastics can contain a greater number and higher concentration of hazardous chemicals. Last month, a study in the journal Science found that a global plastic production cap would also result in greater greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2050 than seven other policies, including targets for more recycling and recycled content.

Coca-Cola made its two pledges on virgin plastics reduction and reusable packaging in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The pledges followed resolutions filed by organizations that engage in shareholder advocacy, using their investments in a company to influence corporate management. 

The 2020 resolution, written by the environmentally responsible mutual fund Green Century Capital Management, highlighted the “reputational, market, regulatory, operational, climate, and competitive risks” stemming from Coca-Cola’s association with plastic pollution. It asked Coca-Cola to set a goal for reducing its plastic use — which Coca-Cola did, in exchange for the withdrawal of the resolution before it was presented to shareholders. Coca-Cola said that by 2025, it would use 3 million metric tons less virgin plastic “derived from nonrenewable sources.”

The second resolution was filed in 2021 by Green Century and another shareholder advocacy group called As You Sow. It made a similar argument and resulted in Coca-Cola’s pledge to sell 25 percent of its beverage volume in a reusable format — whether in glass or plastic bottles, or from soda fountains — by 2030.

When Coca-Cola made its reuse pledge in 2022, it was hailed as a first-of-its-kind, industry-leading approach to the plastics problem. The company already had a robust reuse network, particularly in South America, where it had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in designing a refillable bottle that could be used across its various brands, and in the infrastructure needed to collect, clean, and refill bottles. As of last year, returnable glass and durable plastic bottles represented more than half of the company’s beverage sales in 20 markets.

After announcing the pledge, the company launched reuse programs in bigger markets. In North America, Coca-Cola last year launched a partnership with the company r.Cup to serve its beverages in reusable plastic cups at sports and entertainment venues. It was working with A&W Canada on an “exchangeable cup” program, and said it was distributing beverage dispensers instead of vending machines at some theme parks and university campuses.

In El Paso, Texas, Coca-Cola has been working since 2022 on a pilot program to sell more of its beverages in returnable glass bottles. Once empty, the bottles are sent across the border to Mexico to be cleaned, and then they’re returned to the U.S. to be refilled and sold again. 

Coca-Cola promoted its reuse initiatives in quarterly earnings reports as recently as this July, and it mentioned its quantitative target to boost refillable options in communications from late 2023. But as of late November, both the reuse pledge and the virgin plastic pledge had disappeared from portions of the company’s website, along with the homepage of the Coca-Cola’s World Without Waste initiative, which launched in 2018 and claimed to support a “circular economy” for packaging. 

In its blog post, the company also announced less stringent benchmarks for recycling. Coca-Cola now plans to make 30 to 35 percent of its plastic packaging out of recycled materials by 2035, instead of 50 percent by 2030. And instead of making 100 percent of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and collecting one bottle or can for each one sold, Coca-Cola now says it will “help ensure the collection” of just 70 to 75 percent of the number of bottles and cans it produces, also by 2035.

The new approach is “informed by learnings gathered through decades of work in sustainability, periodic assessment of progress, and identified challenges,” according to the blog post. 

Amy Larkin, founder of an organization called PR3 that’s developing standards for reuse systems, declined to comment on Coca-Cola specifically, but she said that consumer brands often have difficulty building reuse infrastructure because they “continue to think about it as a new product line, instead of a system that they have to develop. 

“Most of these companies have deployed reuse pilots on their own. That won’t work,” she added. Instead, Larkin thinks companies need to collaborate to build robust reuse systems that work with multiple brands. “Any new system takes time, attention, and early investment.”

Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, said Coca-Cola’s move away from its reuse target seemed not to have resulted from external factors, like a lack of interest among the public. “This is an active decision by Coca-Cola management that, for whatever reason, they’re not going to pursue the strategy that actually results in them using less plastic.” 

Coca-Cola declined to explain to Grist why it decided to scrap its reuse target instead of revising it downward, as it did with its recycling goals. It’s possible that Coca-Cola was responding to anti-greenwashing legislation approved by the European Union earlier this year, which broadly prohibits businesses from making environmental claims that are out of sync with their business practices. Since Coca-Cola made its reuse pledge in 2022, it has actually decreased the fraction of its beverages sold in a reusable or refillable format, with growth in single-use categories outstripping its reuse efforts. And it increased virgin plastic use between 2018 and 2023. In a statement to Grist, a Coca-Cola spokesperson acknowledged that “laws and policies in the markets we operate in are always changing.”

According to a survey released earlier this year by the Swiss consulting firm South Pole, 70 percent of “climate-conscious” companies are being quiet about their climate and environmental commitments in order to comply with new regulations and avoid public scrutiny. South Pole defined a “climate-conscious” company as one with more than 1,000 employees and a sustainability-focused director-level position — a definition that Coca-Cola meets. 

Overpromising may create regulatory risks, but pledging too little risks backlash from investors and consumers, as demonstrated by the resolutions from Green Century and As You Sow that led Coca-Cola to create its reuse and virgin plastic targets in the first place.

“That Coca-Cola has abandoned its refillable commitment is alarming, regrettable, and regressive,” said Frances Fairhead-Stanova, a shareholder advocate for Green Century. She added that the company is “likely to face heightened regulatory and reputational risks due to its new approach to plastic packaging, which is unduly reliant on recyclability over plastic reduction and reuse.” 

Kelly McBee, circular economy manager for As You Sow, also said Coca-Cola’s new focus on recycling alone is “an ineffective strategy” for tackling plastic pollution. “In effect,” she added, “Coke is embracing the linear ‘take-make-waste’ mindset that created the global plastic pollution crisis in the first place.”

Coca-Cola’s deadline for filing shareholder resolutions was November 18, so it’s too late to file one asking the company to reinstate its reuse target this year. Fairhead-Stanova and McBee declined to say whether their organizations would file any plastics-related resolutions with Coca-Cola next year.

A spokesperson for Coca-Cola said the company intends to “continue to invest to expand the use of refillable packaging in markets where infrastructure is in place to support this important part of the company’s portfolio.” They also said that the use of recycled content and more efficient packaging could indirectly reduce the company’s use of virgin plastic.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is already facing a slew of legal challenges related to its plastics use. Last month, Los Angeles County sued the company, along with PepsiCo, for contributing to plastic pollution and for implying that plastic bottles could be recycled an infinite number of times. In a press release, the county specifically called out the beverage companies for making “false promises that they would increase the use of recycled plastic by certain percentages and eliminate the use of virgin plastic.”

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report, Coca-Cola has only increased the fraction of its plastic packaging made from recycled content by 8 percentage points, half of the 16 percentage points it had pledged by 2025. PepsiCo also fell short of its recycled content goal by 15 percentage points. 

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation did not respond to Grist’s request for comment. A PepsiCo spokesperson said that the company “made progress on reducing virgin plastic use in 2023 year-over-year” — although its 2023 use was 6 percent higher than in 2020 — and called this issue “a complex challenge.”

The city of Baltimore filed its own complaint against Coca-Cola and other food and beverage companies earlier this year for “creating products that they know will cause significant environmental harms.” The nonprofit Earth Island Institute has two ongoing lawsuits against the company: one over the “public nuisance” created by Coca-Cola’s plastic pollution, and another over the way the company represents itself as “sustainable and environmentally friendly.”

In Europe last year, an umbrella group representing 44 consumer advocacy organizations submitted a formal complaint to European Union authorities over Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé, and other companies’ representation of their plastic bottles as sustainable. They are still awaiting a response.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups that celebrated Coca-Cola’s erstwhile plastics sustainability goals are coming to terms with the corporation’s about-face. Pearse and his team at the Story of Stuff had been working on a short film about Coca-Cola’s refillable pilot program in El Paso — they released the film this week — and it came as a surprise to them that the company was abandoning its reuse target.

“I’d like to see more of the left hand talking to the right,” Pearse told Grist. “If you are really serious about these kinds of pledges, you need to ensure that they run through the way that a business is doing its practices and operations.”