The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [125]
An increasingly militant movement in both Plachimada and Mehdiganj began using more direct tactics to put pressure on Coke. Word of the BBC report about Coke’s toxic sludge gave new fire to the community in Mehdiganj, which demanded its local pollution control board carry out tests. But Uttar Pradesh (UP), the state in which Varanasi is located, is not Kerala. Both culturally and politically, the state is strictly ordered along caste lines, with the Shudra and Dalit castes populating the rural villages strictly separated from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes populating finance and industry. It also has a reputation for being one of the more corrupt states in the country. In 2009, a few months before the Lok Samiti graduation ceremony, police arrested the regional head of the state pollution control board in Varanasi—the person responsible for overseeing the Mehdiganj Coke plant. They charged him with taking a bribe from another business in exchange for a “no objection” certificate allowing it to operate.
Years earlier, however, the pollution control board not only declined to test Coke’s sludge, but also denied Coke was even distributing it to farmers. “The pollution control board said, ‘We have visited the village and they are not doing this,’ ” says Nandlal. “ ‘If you have seen this, show it to us.’” Exasperated, he and his fellow activists appeared at the board’s offices one day with a sack full of sludge and dumped it on the desk of the clerk: “We kind of took him hostage.” Several dozen protesters blocked the main entrance until officials agreed to investigate.
By this time, the establishments in Mehdiganj and Plachimada weren’t the only bottling plants facing controversy. A study by the state pollution board in West Bengal found toxic levels of cadmium in the effluent of three plants around Kolkata. And in 2003, the Central Pollution Control Board conducted tests of sludge from sixteen Coke and Pepsi plants—and found eight Coke plants to have excessive levels of lead and cadmium. And it added a third toxin: chromium, a heavy metal that causes skin rashes and dermatitis on contact and is a suspected carcinogen with repeated ingestion. The agency henceforth ordered Coca-Cola to treat its waste as hazardous, requiring disposal in specially lined concrete landfills.
More recently, the nonprofit Hazards Centre has continued to confirm the presence of toxic heavy metals around Coke plants. Located on Delhi’s southern fringes in a cramped concrete apartment building, the office is a buzzing hive of young researchers sitting around computers. In the middle sits director Dunu Roy, sporting a white ponytail and balding slightly on top.
Roy’s group first did an assessment of Plachimada’s groundwater back in 2006; since then it has done assessments of water conditions at five other Coke plants around India, publishing a report in 2010. In each location, the scientists measured the presence of lead, cadmium, and chromium in both the groundwater and the effluent coming directly out of the plant. All five plants contained chromium, some in levels of up to eleven times government limits. In addition, cadmium was found at two plants, including Mehdiganj, and lead at one. In summary, says Roy, “two things are incontrovertible.” One: that the water draining directly out of the plant contains heavy metals. And two: that contamination in the groundwater decreases as one gets farther away from the plants.
So what about the wastewater treatment plant that Ranjan so proudly showed off at the Mehdiganj plant? Roy takes one look at the data showing limits on pH, dissolved solids, and oxygen demand, and immediately says that Coke is tracking the wrong numbers. That data, he says, will tell you only if the water is potable, not that it is free from chemical contamination. None of the aeration or filtering that