Coca-Cola increased plastic use ahead of COP27 summit it is sponsoring

https://www.ft.com/content/662d4a0d-e8f5-4cd4-b03f-05b97e13e771

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

106 95 4 years ago

LatteLazy3• 4 years ago

COP summits are where the world get's together to pretend it cares or will do something about emissions while secretly following the opposite policy. Coke's actions are exactly in line with this mission. They're to be congratualted.

readthenotes12• 4 years ago

A few decades ago there was a convention to solve world hunger. The delegates were very well fed.

I can only imagine the amount of private jet miles used to attend this summit, as well as the amount of carbon use to cart in the delicacies that the attendees need to soothe themselves

rocgf• 4 years ago

To me, this type of argument is so hard to understand that I'm not sure if you're serious or not.

Private jets are bad and wasteful & the people attending that are pricks anyway etc. etc. Everybody agrees.

But I actually see no issue with the attendees flying in on private jets in and of itself. The impact of all that travel is basically just a drop in the ocean and could easily be made up for with a stroke of a pen if those people would actually convene to do some good. Do you really want your PM/president wasting 2 days getting there? I personally wouldn't.

im3w1l2• 4 years ago

Well-fed means they ate a days worth of food a day. A return flight on a private jet emits years worth of CO2.

nrki• 4 years ago

The fact that Coca-Cola sponsors a climate conference is crazy to me. That a UN climate conference NEEDS a corporate sponsor is also ridiculous.

ars6• 4 years ago

The fact that Coca-Cola sponsors a climate conference is crazy to me.

It's not that crazy: Scenario: the product you make needs plastic packaging. You want to do as best you can with the constraint that you will keep shipping product. So you sponsor a climate conference to get ideas on what you can improve.

The option of "don't ship product" is not an option. Given that, what can you do instead?

karmakurtisaani• 4 years ago

Or, you sponsor a conference that you can say you're doing something, while actually pushing your influence to make sure the most profitable actions are taken in the end.

bondarchuk• 4 years ago

It makes perfect sense from coca cola's perspective to sponsor a climate conference, what makes no sense at all and what I think GP is getting at is that it's completely insane from the climate conference's perspective to be sponsored by coca cola.

(And please spare me the cynical explanation of why it does make sense from a cynical climate conference's perspective.)

brundozer• 4 years ago

So you sponsor a climate conference to get ideas on what you can improve.

What kind of ideas does sponsoring give you access to that you wouldn't get otherwise?

andrei_says_• 4 years ago

Corporations are sociopathic entities dedicated to extraction of wealth.

As such they end up accumulating most of the wealth, at the expense of everyone and everything else - including our biosphere.

Wealth is power. It is literally a contract to make people do as one says.

Corporations use this power to encode their advantages in laws - laws that all of us are bound to follow, despite having no consent in creating them.

Sociopathic entities will do anything without perception of morals. Sponsoring an environmental conference must be good for perception and that must be good for business.

We humans have magnified and empowered and deitified some of the scariest tendencies of our minds and turned them into unstoppable entities of epic proportions. Now we walk amongst these demons of our own creation, somehow hypnotized in accepting the global destruction they cause as completely normal.

This is nothing new for anyone here - and we all go about our days.

bluescrn2• 4 years ago

Not as crazy as the number of people who'll be flying in on private jets for the conference.

umeshunni• 4 years ago

A tiny number compared to the number of people flying daily.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

There are ~100,000 flights per day. Who cares?

ars6• 4 years ago

Um, why are we recycling plastic? We already know that burning plastic for energy is the superior option environmentally.

If you have questions about toxins, or how it's environmentally superior in every way vs recycling, here is a thread I participated in that covers that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322845

axiometry• 4 years ago

Citation? You didn't respond to mrinterweb in that thread, who cited this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

ars6• 4 years ago

I mean read the first line: "Incineration of plastic waste in an open field"

I am not advocating an "open field". Incinerate it for energy, in a properly designed incinerator (which is existing technology in wide use). That article is talking about waste disposal, I'm talking about using it as fuel.

jrmg3• 4 years ago

A large and, to me, counterintuitive assumption is backing your argument there:

Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc).

Humans have a remarkable capacity to use all that’s available to them if unconstrained. Why would we not burn the plastic _and_ the other fuel? Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?

I could easily make the opposite argument that “putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.

ars6• 4 years ago

Why would we not burn the plastic _and_ the other fuel?

Why would we? When you turn on the light, or drive in your car, are you thinking "hmm, they burned some plastic, let me drive extra"? No, the only signal you use is the cost of the product.

Are you proposing we somehow regulate the ‘swap’ here?

It's automatically regulated by the fact that you have to pay for it. Plastic for fuel is similar in price to other fuels. You're not going to have extra consumption.

“putting plastic in landfill sequesters carbon we’d otherwise burn”. That argument seems more intuitively correct to me.

As a technique to advance the argument sure we can talk about that, but "intuitive"????? I feel like you're missing something major if that feels intuitive to you.

We should find out what that is, or we'll be talking across each other, without understanding.

Are you theorizing we automatically burn every bit of fuel available to us? That's not how it works - people have a need for energy, they check the price of the energy and see if it's worth spending that much to accomplish their need.

Plastic for fuel is very valuable because someone already paid (in energy) to extract it from the ground. So now, you don't have to pay for that energy a second time. This is very good for the environment.

bcrl3• 4 years ago

Glass bottles were reused then recycled for many decades. Why exactly are we using plastic? Plastic is not "cheaper" if the total cost of all externalities resulting from its use are included.

One of our local grocery store finally switched back to paper bags this past week. Paper bags used to be the default back in the 1980s.

im3w1l2• 4 years ago

Glass is heavier and breaks into dangerous shards if you drop it. Paper bags get soggy and tear when it's raining. Plastic is used because it's better.

ch4s33• 4 years ago

More CO2 is released moving that glass around than the whole lifecycle of the plastic by an order of magnitude. A glass bottle on average weighs 40x what a PET bottle of similar volume weighs.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

The EU has done tons of studies on what methods of food packaging are the most environmentally friendly when you consider a large number of secondary and tertiary environmental impact scenarios.

Plastic composites still win until renewable energy is extremely abundant and transport costs go to zero.

Synaesthesia2• 4 years ago

China is now mandating reusable bottles and phasing out single-use plastic items.

Overtonwindow• 4 years ago

That’s easier to do in a country with as much government control as China. would that work federally in America?

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

Who cleans it? Does the cost structure rely on slave labor?

RC_ITR9• 4 years ago

This is a classic example of a 'Wicked Problem' [0]

Plastic is a literal miracle material - light-weight, infinitely formable, strong, flexible, not made from observable natural resources (e.g. trees <> paper), water resistant, rot-resistant, sterile, a meaningful carbon sink (lol - better than burning that oil!) etc.

Other materials that do not have those properties should be recycled for various reasons, but those characteristics do not really apply to plastic.

For example, if we sucked up every drop of oil in the crust, made it plastic and then re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides, whereas cutting down every tree or mining/smelting all the aluminum would be noticeably bad.

Humans, being the pattern matchers we are see 'recycling glass/paper/aluminum is good, plastic bottles are similar to glass bottles, recycling plastic must be good too'

So instead of doing the very simple thing of just burying our plastic (like we used to), a bunch of well-meaning pattern matchers spend a lot of effort trying to make plastic recycling work, even though, for reasons intrinsic to the chemical properties that make plastic a miracle material it is a mostly pointless endeavor.

Then, as always happens, bad actors step in to make money of the well-intended who are at the end of their rope (in this case Asian 'recyclers' who would accept plastic trash and recycle it by putting it in the ocean).

And so now, not only do we have a ton more plastic in the ocean, we have airports banning plastic bottles, which increases the weight of flights (glass bottles are heavy! and for some reason almost no vendors at SFO sell tetrapak water!) and burns more jet fuel.

And any reasonable person who argues 'the oil came from the ground, why don't we just put it back when we are done with it is met with vague concerns about microplastics.

So yeah, welcome to society, I guess.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

morsch3• 4 years ago

No downsides expect the environmental impact of resource extraction and refinement.

A 500ml glass bottle weighs approximately 250g, which is inefficient in terms of weight contained. But it's pretty insignificant compared to the weight of the passenger and their luggage. There are also reusable plastic bottles.

I'm not entirely convinced the plastic is inert enough to bury it in a shallow hole, but that's something that could be established if it isn't already. Burning it for power and heat also seems fine to me as long as we're still burning orders of magnitude more oil, gas and coal.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

For example, if we sucked up every drop of oil in the crust, made it plastic and then re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides, whereas cutting down every tree or mining/smelting all the aluminum would be noticeably bad.

There's so many incorrect statements in your post I don't know where to start, but:

We don't recycle aluminium because mining/smelting all the aluminium would be noticeably bad.

Nor do we recycle paper and other wood products because cutting all the trees down would be bad.

Burying plastics in landfills is regularly shown to be less desireable than recycling (and even burning with energy recovery while fossil fuels are still in use).

You've created a world of confusion to justify some vague fossil fuel propaganda you were subjected to. And now you're complaining that people won't listen to your "reasonable" argument.

ranguna2• 4 years ago

re-buried it in landfills, there's barely any observable downsides

Please elaborate. Its not like we are in a world crisis where marine life is dying and even humans are found to have more and more micro plastics in our bodies.

You do know that landfills are not nuclear disposal facilities, right?

Nature will process that plastic in unimaginable ways, which will lead to unforseen consequences. Consequences we see today, hence why people want to move away from single use plastic.

bdcravens• 4 years ago

Of course they are sponsoring it. Those who have the most to lose want to be in a position to control the narrative. Any org that takes money has to understand the alignment of incentives.

sremani• 4 years ago

Look at the website - https://cop27.eg/#/ - look at the Sponsors and supporters with an exception of Siemens energy not a single energy company of heft.

I would have taken COP27 seriously if they at least had Glencore et al. or ABCD of food industry.

It is always the dog that did not bark.

Tarsul• 4 years ago

at least one can see there very clearly that Coca-Cola is only a third tier supporter, so it's not like they are THE sponsor of this summit (which was my first reading of the headline).

RunningDroid• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/FuflV

boxed• 4 years ago

Coca-Cola in plastic bottles taste terrible. That's the irony.

Coca-Cola increased plastic use ahead of COP27 summit it is sponsoring

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