Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [62]
“How do you describe the taste of the finished product?” I ask.
In one voice, three Coke soldiers recite, “Crisp, refreshing.”
Donning shower cap and earplugs, I race through the bottling plant with Mahabir, noting tanks, tubes, and pipes. He points out machines that subject the water to ultrafiltration and carbon filtration (to trap tiny organic and inorganic particles), to ultraviolet light (which inactivates cryptosporidium), and to reverse osmosis (which removes all traces of minerals and salts). I see the machine that injects the water with new minerals and salts, which give Dasani its distinctive taste, and the contraption that blasts the final product with disinfecting ozone.
When my allotted time is up, I’ve got more questions. Over the next week, I phone and e-mail the regional handler, who eventually concedes I must call HQ, in Atlanta. But when I telephone and e-mail my queries to the next gatekeeper—questions about water use, recycling, and bottle bills—I fall into a black hole.
Months pass, I repeat my inquiries, and suddenly Coke starts talking—not to me but to the world. The company is cutting water use, it announces, through reduction and reuse. (In 2006, Coke used 290 billion liters of water to produce 114 billion liters of beverages.) It plans to lightweight its Dasani bottles, from 18.2 grams of plastic to 13.8. It’s going to build a plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and recycle as many as two billion bottles a year, producing about one hundred million pounds of food-grade recycled PET each year. (In 2006, almost four billion pounds of PET were trashed—equivalent to roughly seventy-two billion bottles.) Whether the company will use that PET in its own bottles remains to be seen.
I’d love to take credit for inspiring the company’s actions, but my handlers never returned my calls. Had they, I could have reminded them that waste activists still mistrust Coke for backing down on a 2003 pledge to use 10 percent recycled content by 2005. (In 2006, according to the trade journal Plastic News, the company used just 3.8 percent recycled content in its soda bottles; in 2005, Pepsi used 10 percent in its soda bottles.) I would have said that setting up a recycling plant is good, but it hardly makes up for the fact the company is still producing and selling, for enormous profit, unhealthy drinks (sodas, that is). And that while recycling is virtuous, it is less environmentally preferable to reusing and refilling bottles.
Coke isn’t the only company scrutinizing its environmental footprint in this summer of discontent. Pulled by economics (waste is expensive) and pushed by activists (expert at embarrassing industry for its excesses), other bottlers start announcing changes as well. Nestlé shrinks its cardboard packaging, reduces the weight of its bottles from 15 to 12.5 grams of plastic, cuts the area of its paper labels by 30 percent, inaugurates a recycling program at the New York Marathon (where seventy-five thousand one-gallon Poland Spring containers water the runners), starts pushing a variety of stakeholders to develop a comprehensive redemption system for plastic packaging (a huge breakthrough, if it works), slashes water use to the lowest in the industry, and converts sixty-four tanker trucks to run on a biodiesel mixture made from rendered animal fat and soy. The switch will reduce the fleet’s carbon emissions by more than 1.8 million pounds per year. “I’m pretty sure we’ll score an A,” Kim Jeffery, chief of Nestlé Waters North America, tells the New York Times in an article about downsized packaging. “Let’s see if it translates into more business.”
Still, Nestlé has some stiff competition in Icelandic Glacial. In June