For decades, Coca-Cola

burned its image as an environmentally caring company with donations to recycling nonprofits. Meanwhile, as one of the world’s most polluting brands, Coke has quietly fought efforts to hold the company accountable for plastic waste.

Audio from a meeting of recycling leaders obtained by the Intercept shows how soda giants green philanthropy helped squelch what could be an important tool in the fight against the plastic crisis and shines a light on the behind-the-scenes tactics drinks and plastics companies have quietly used for decades to avoid responsibility for their waste. A meeting of the coalition group, known as Atlanta Recycles, was held in January at the recycling center in Atlanta.

Among the topics on the agenda for recycling experts was a grant arriving in Atlanta as part of a multi-million dollar Coke campaign was launched to boost recycling and help inspire the grassroots movement. But it quickly became clear that one possible way to raise the recycling rate of the bottle bill was off the table.

Jerez John Seidel, Director of the Atlanta mayors sustainability Office:

like to bring here, just thinking, making sure to look to other cities as well as States for policies that will push for more or encourage more recycling. And I think it’s been a very long time since the state of Georgia even considered something like a bottle bill. I think it’s something worth looking at.

Seydel was right. If they were truly interested in increasing the recycling rate, a bottle bill or container deposit law, which requires beverage companies to tack a charge onto the price of their drink to be refunded after its returned, would be well worth looking at. People are far more likely to return their bottles if theres a financial incentive. States with bottle bills recycle about 60 percent of their bottles and cans, as opposed to 24 percent in other states. And states that have bottle bills also have an average of 40 percent less beverage container litter on their coasts, according to a 2018 study of the U.S. and Australia published in the journal Marine Policy.

But the bottle bills also put some of the responsibility and cost of recycling back on companies that produce waste, which may be why coke and other soda companies have long fought against them.

that the answer is a big no.

This is Gloria Hardegree, Executive Director of the Georgia recycling coalition, an organization that receives funding from Coca-Cola. And she was sure her organization?s longtime benefactor will dead set against bottle bill:

what Coca-Cola is preparing to do in Atlanta and in other major cities across the U.S. with this world without waste, it will not be part of that conversation.

The “world without waste” program that Hardegree mentioned is what Coke calls its holistic plan to recycle every bottle and could produce it by 2030. Its a lofty goal and many would say its unrealistic, especially without state or national Deposit laws. But Hardegree made it clear that she did not expect Coca-Cola to budge, and that the money depended on not insisting on this effective disposal strategy.

do it our way, or we can opt out of participating, you know, in the funding that they’re preparing to provide.

Kanika Greenlee, Executive Director of the Keep Atlanta Beautiful Commission and Vice Chairman of Keep America Beautiful, which receives Cox funding, agreed that the Atlanta-based company would likely pull funds if the group decided to support the bottle bill. Greenlee is also the Director of environmental programs for the city of Atlanta.

is that not that this bill doesn’t sound like a decent conversation, but I feel like it could jeopardize the funding that we have in place.

Coke is not the only soda company that is likely opposed to working on a bottle bill. Heres Hardegree again, answering a question posed by Seidel:

on Board, who else would fight him? Everyone in the bottling and beverage industry: Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Dr. pepper.

Asked about his comments at the meeting, Seidel said he supported them. He also praised Coke’s recent efforts to bottle plastics found in the ocean. Things change, and they have to change.

In an email, Gloria Hargradus wrote that the purpose of the January meeting was to review the groups ‘ annual work plan. The political issue was taken out of context by another person present. The discussion about the bottle bills, Hardegree wrote in another letter, was a very small part of the annual planning meeting addressing project goals for the comprehensive recycling support group for the city.

Kanika Greenlee did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Keep America Beautiful said Greenlee represented the city of Atlanta and the Keep Atlanta Beautiful Commission at the meeting.

In response to questions from the Intercept, a Coca-Cola spokesman said the company awarded a recycling partnership grant to support a community recycling program in Atlanta that was designed to increase curbside recycling rates, improve collection, expand recycling in residents ‘ apartment buildings and increase recycling on College campuses. The letter noted that no one from the company attended the meeting and that the company’s views on public policy do not depend on the charity the Coca-Cola Foundation.

The prosecution of consumers

While other soda companies have resisted bottle bills, Coke should know better than almost anyone how successful deposits can be in getting customers to return their bottles: They pioneered the system. For decades, Coca-Cola was only available in returned glass bottles. In 1948, when Coca-Cola drinkers put down a small Deposit of nearly half of what they paid for the drink they returned about 96 percent of the distinctive fluted bottles, according to a study conducted that year by the United States Committee for conservation of resources.

But that changed after Coca-Cola began switching to plastic bottles in the 1950s. As waste accumulated, the public began to push the company to take responsibility for it. Cox pushed back hard with a double-edged attack strategy effort to make the industry deal with waste, promoting the message that consumers were instead to blame for the problem. Both were accomplished largely through common-sounding organizations that worked on behalf of coke and other soda and bottle companies while keeping their brands out of the public eye.

In 1953, just after Vermont passed the nation’s first bottle bill, a group of beverage and packaging companies, along with Philip Morris, founded the anti-trash organization Keep America Beautiful. Keep America Beautiful was a direct response to what happened in Vermont, says Susan Collins, President of the container recycling Institute, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to studying and improving recycling in North America.

Coke?s strategy of using other organizations to convey its messages proved useful. In 1968, when state and federal legislation was proposed that would have made deposits on nonreturnable containers mandatory, Coke didnt lobby against it, at least not publicly. Instead, it was the National Soft Drink Association, funded by Coke, that did the work to defeat the bill. At the same time, Keep America Beautiful was letting people know that keeping America beautiful is your job. Those who failed at that job were litterbugs, or, as the nonprofit organization made disturbingly clear in a video that year, pigs.

In response to questions for this article, Noah Ullman, a spokesman for Keep America Beautiful, wrote in an email that KAB is not opposed to these bills. We believe that all options for dealing with recycling, including Deposit legislation, should be on the table and evaluated. This is not a new position for KAB.

Meanwhile Coke was fashioning itself a folksy, Earth-friendly corporate image. In 1971, sandwiched in between two legislative fights in which lobbyists funded by Coca-Cola and other beverage companies defeated federal bills that would have banned nonreturnable beverage bottles, Coke put out its now infamous hilltop ad. Even as the trade association it supported was quietly blocking the creation of a national system that might have managed the massive waste it would go on to produce, publicly, Coke was permanently fusing its brand name to apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves.

Massive subsidy to the beverage industry

Coca-Cola currently makes 117 billion plastic bottles a year, by its own estimates, untold billions of which end up being burned or dumped in landfills and waste. Coke was responsible for more waste than any other company in the 2018 global plastic cleanup conducted by advocacy group Break Free From Plastic, with coke-branded plastic found along the coast and in the parks and streets of 40 of the 42 participating countries.

On the political front, its advocacy against bottle bills has largely succeeded. Only 10 states now have bottle bills on the books, most of which passed in the 1970s and 80s. Georgia, where the meeting of recycling leaders was being held, isnt one of them. Like most of the country and the world, the state finds itself inundated with plastic. In the first six months of this year alone, Georgia exported 21.6 million kilograms of plastic waste, most of which went to poor countries with little ability to manage it, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Senegal, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam.

Why have Coca-Cola and other beverage companies fought so hard against bottle bills? At the heart of this is a commitment not to be responsible for their packaging, said Collins of the container recycling Institute. It really all comes down to this bill and they would prefer if someone else paid for it.

According to Collins, industry funding for local nonprofit organizations has been an important tool for defeating bottle bills. Coca-Cola and other beverage companies fund to some extent the recycling organizations in every state and use those funds in influential ways, she said. They exert pressure on those organizations to speak out against beverage container deposit laws. Were Coke openly making the case against bottle bills, it would be perceived as acting out of self- interest. But when the words come out of the mouths of the recycling professionals,? Collins said, ?especially statewide recycling organizations, then those words carry some weight.

Coke’s decades of behind-the-scenes efforts have managed to shift the cost of waste management from coke and other beverage companies to municipal recycling programs, according to Bartow Elmore, historian and author of Citizen coke: Making Coca-Cola Capitalism. Coke took what the company had to manage and pay for and really put it to the public, said Elmore, who described the taxpayer-funded curbside recycling that arose in the absence of a nationwide Deposit system as massive subsidies we ended up providing to the beverage industry.

Maintenance processing of dysfunctional

Beverage and plastic industry-funded nonprofits have gotten in the way of other meaningful attempts to address recycling, according to Mitch Hedlund, executive director of the nonprofit Recycle Across America. Hedlund met with the board of Keep America Beautiful in August to discuss the use of standardized labels for recycling bins. The labels help prevent contamination of the waste stream, which is part of the reason that only about a fifth of our trash is recycled. Used in school districts, national parks, and throughout the state of Rhode Island, the standardized labels brought about reductions in trash hauling expenses and increased recycling rates, according to tracking done by Recycle Across America. Nevertheless, Keep America Beautiful decided not to use the labels, as Hedlund learned from an email a few days later.

Hedlund said she wasnt surprised that Keep America Beautiful whose board members include executives from Coca-Cola North America, the American Chemistry Council, and Dow, the worlds biggest plastic producer ultimately opted not to use the standardized labels. They all benefit from recycling not working, said Hedlund, whose organization developed but doesnt financially benefit from the labels. But she said she was surprised when the organizations executive director, Helen Lowman, admitted several days later that some of the corporate members of her board were standing in the way of Keep America Beautiful improving the recycling process.

In Hedlund’s phone call with Lowman to discuss the meeting, I said, Helen, you and your organization are severely compromised by these conflicts of interest, Hedlund recalled. And she said you were right. You’re 100 percent right. Hedlund said she went on to lay out reasons why she believes plastic manufacturers on Board Keep American Beautiful may object to strategies that substantially increase recycling rates.

It’s just clear that recycling partnership and keep America Beautiful really depends heavily on the virgin plastics industry, Hedlund recalled telling Lowman. There will be no place for the society-wide standardized label solution because they know that it works, and when it works, they know that it will dramatically reduce the amount of virgin plastic products that they will produce in the U.S. and around the world. Lowman also agreed with that assessment, according to Hedlund.

Through Ullman, a Keep America Beautiful spokesperson, Lowman said she did not remember that quote or the context of the conversation with Hedlund. Ullman also wrote in an email that Keep America Beautiful is not against standardized labels. that clear communication and standardization are part of the solution to a very complex problem.

Ullmann also wrote that we have agreed goals with Recycle Across America, the container recycling Institute, and others. Manufacturers and government work together. We get that some people disagree with this approach. We see it as the best way to achieve our similar goals. Wed would like to go through all these semantical arguments and get some things done.

Global strategy

Coca-Cola appears to have deployed a similar strategy around the world. The company supports environmental and recycling organisations in dozens of countries, including Keep New Zealand Beautiful, Ukraine Without Waste, Keep Britain Tidy, Ciudad Saludable in Lima and Keep Australia Beautiful.

A few months ago, Coke came out in support of the bottle Deposit program in Australia. And in 2017, the company announced it would support a similar plan in Scotland. The announcement followed the publication of a leaked Greenpeace document showing that the company had lobbied against Deposit systems and reusable quotas in Europe for years.

In his email, coke sheep Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola System) has been involved in Deposit systems around the world and has been doing so for 40 years, including across Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria and across Europe.

However, most of the international largesse companies seem designed to promote a sense of personal responsibility for waste. In 2017, the Coca-Cola Foundation gave $ 345,000 to the American India Foundation to support recycling competitions and quarterly awareness, for example, and $209,379 to support marine debris cleanup on the Amsterdam and Rotterdam canals to 3,600 schoolchildren.

Among the Coca-Cola Foundation’s grants in Indonesia was a $ 172,129 gift to an organization called Yayasan Greeneration Indonesia to educate tourists about responsible and sustainable tourism and empower locals to start managing and reducing waste to keep their neighborhoods clean, according to a list of Foundation grants paid in 2017.

But the island nation is still overflowing with plastic, much of it from Coca-Cola, according to Nina van Toulon, founder and Director of the Indonesian waste platform. You go to the most remote village here in hours from everywhere and there is bottled water and Coca Cola. But then people in the village burn it, said van Toulon, who is based on Flores island. These companies have made efforts to get their products in these villages, but they are not making efforts to get plastic back from the villages.

Charity giving that encourages additional solutions and giving the beverage industry a green image is part of the problem, van Toulon said. All these NGOs are very vulnerable because they do not have the means.

These companies have made efforts to get their products in these villages, but they are not making efforts to get plastic back from the villages.

A similar problem was faced by residents Hulhumale, Maldives. Plastic bottles litter the streets and beaches of the island with a length of one and a half miles in South Asia. Cleaning them costs over a million dollars each year. Thus, four residents joined together to solve this problem, receiving a grant from the UN development Programme and the local telecommunications company Ooredoo Maldives. Their pilot project, the Deposit return plan for plastic bottles, which ended in may, resulted in the return of 81 percent of plastic bottles.

Of the three companies, they were the least responsive, said Ismail, who noted that the company’s local representatives were unfamiliar with Coca-Colas ‘ promise to recycle all the bottles it produces by 2030. Our whole team felt like they were trying to detain the pilot. We felt like they were trying to sabotage the whole thing.

Coca-Cola did not comment on Ismailami’s description of his experience with the company, but pointed to his support for joint packaging collection activities with a grant To the packaging and recycling Alliance for sustainable environment Indonesia, which supports sustainable and integrated packaging waste management solutions in Indonesia.

It may not ultimately be a question of whether Coca-Cola helps or stands in the way of a small island bottle Deposit plan. The Maldives has announced its intention to phase out single-use plastic as a nation by 2023. At the same time, it will introduce extended producer liability schemes such as bottle deposits.

Maldives is not alone in moving toward this simple and effective approach to the bottles mounting around the world. In the past two years, there has been an international resurgence of enthusiasm for bottle bills. In January 2017, just under 300 million people lived in places that had deposit laws, according to a recent article in Resource Recycling magazine. Since then, container deposits have been put in place in Romania, the U.K., India, and Turkey, among other countries. By 2021, once the new programs are up and running, the number of people with deposit laws will have doubled to 600 million. And by 2030, the number is expected to reach at least 1 billion.

Here in the US, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. Container buyback programs have been shut down recently. And beverage industry-funded nonprofits, including Keep America Beautiful and its 707 local affiliates, have a leadership role in how plastic waste gets cleaned up or not.

Their money is particularly influential due to China’s decision not to accept plastic waste, which has made recycling prohibitively expensive in an increasing number of cities. There’s a check hanging over everyone’s head, Hedlund said, across America. Despite the reality behind the scenes, the drinks and plastic industries huge resources allow the groups they Fund to convey that they are leading the charge to improve recycling. Publicly, they say they are for everything that works, Hedlund said. But work bans, work buyback programs, and standardized work labels, and they’re against it all.

In Atlanta, plastic wont be the subject of a bottle bill anytime soon. After Seidel raised the idea, a heated argument broke out in the room.

Well, we were going to stop it here.

Eventually, the band decided to take the money, with plastic strings attached.