The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [118]
The first glimpses inside the plant there are underwhelming. In the stairwell just inside the entrance, a Sundblom Santa Claus smiles from an old poster, his red suit faded by the sun. Farther along, the cubicles lining the corridor upstairs are dilapidated, their walls sagging. In the conference room, the tables are covered with peeling contact paper and are surrounded by red plastic lawn furniture and, incongruously, a black leather couch.
Sitting down on the sofa, Ranjan sighs and says the allegations against the company have been blown out of proportion. Yes, water levels in the area have fallen, but the problem is the persistent drought, not the extraction from the plant. “If the question is groundwater depletion, the answer is yes. If the question is whether it’s the responsibility of Coke, the answer is no,” he says. “The simple reason is we are the smallest user, so in that sense, we are the smallest contributor to the problem.” Sticking to the corporate playbook of diffusing responsibility for the problem, he says Coke uses only 3 percent of the area’s groundwater, while agriculture accounts for more than 80 percent.
As for solid waste, he says the company disposes of it at a government-designated facility, and has never distributed it for fertilizer. “We have never dispensed biosolids to farmers,” he says. “Not an ounce, never ever, not here, not anywhere.” That vehemence is surprising, since Hindustan Coca-Cola’s own vice president said as recently as 2003 that the sludge was “supplied to farmers free of cost, as it was found to be a good soil conditioner.” Another statement on Coke’s website asserts that “since 2003, we no longer distribute biosolids to any area farmers for agricultural use,” implying that up until 2003 it did, in fact, distribute sludge.
Ranjan does admit that the company had a problem with wastewater flowing from the plant, but it lasted only three or four days, despite contemporary media accounts that say the problem persisted for months. Even so, he says, the water that flowed from the plant was treated wastewater, which should have been completely harmless—a fact that Ranjan says he will demonstrate after the plant manager, Sanjay Bansal, arrives to lead a tour.
Bansal shows the way to the pump house, where the plant has two bore wells—one with a capacity of 50,000 liters per hour, and a backup of 30,000 liters—for a total extraction of some 15 million liters during June, its busiest month. From there, a pipeline leads to the water treatment facility, where Bansal explains a seven-step process of purification, starting with the application of lime and bleach, continuing through a carbon filter to remove chemicals, then ultraviolet light to kill bacteria, and then successively smaller filters that remove any particles left in the water. From there, the water passes into the bottling facility. “German,” Bansal nods approvingly at the Krones automatic electronic bottling machine on the way past a blur of glass bottles—the one part of the plant that looks identical to the Coca-Cola Enterprises plant in Massachusetts.
Finally, to complete the cycle, the water passes to the wastewater treatment plant, which looks surprisingly rudimentary compared with the shiny and complex intake treatment room. A catwalk leads over several open tanks where water is sprayed with ammonia to reduce the pH level and aerated in a froth to reduce the oxygen bacteria need to survive. The water is then filtered through tanks where chemicals and bacteria dry as sludge, while the rest of the water is pumped into holding tanks to be flushed out as waste.
A small laboratory full of test tubes and beakers checks