Coca-Cola Company has a goal to improve its water efficiency by 20 percent in the next three years, saving 50 million liters of water annually, the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. They hope to reduce carbon emissions by 5% in the next six years, which they say is about 2 million metric tons of carbon, or, the same as planting 600,000 trees. They also intend to create water-use standards for their sugar suppliers.
Clearly, water is a concern for Coca-Cola. In ’07, they sold 68 million cans of Coke, 35 million of Diet Coke and 103 million of My Coke. That’s a lot of water (go ahead and convert it to gallons).
Hence, they’ve teamed up with WWF – interesting bedfellows – for a $20 million dollar project to do some of the stuff noted in the first paragraph.
While a NY Times article said all kinds of gushy things about them on a recent opinion page – accolades abound in other places for Coke’s water program — the only thing worth noting is that they’re out to save themselves. Like the father who gets a community service award for coaching little league for nine years. That’s not community service, he was there to coach his son.
And $20 million? That’s probably a smaller percentage of what I spent on my neighbor’s daughter’s girl scout cookies against my annual net income. I’m just saying.
But, encouragingly, this kind of thing wasn’t happening 10 years ago. If it was, it was purely a PR move. And this is partially a PR move. But the message is the important difference. Coke is saying that this matters to its own survival. They’re not pretending that they’re doing it because they are good citizens – though they pepper us with that too – but they’re claiming it’s important to their business. Their environmental effort is aligned with their business model, which resonates with share holders, which is all good. And it’s going on across most, if not all Fortune 1000 companies.
But for Coke, and all the other conglomerates, this is one little baby toe inside a giant carbon footprint. For we all can imagine the life span of a Coke can from birth to death: the material of the can, the print of the design, the shipping, the factories, the disposal, etc.
It was only five years ago when a 10-day march in India from one Coke bottling plant to another – 150 miles away – drew thousands to rally against Coke for sucking up its water supply and polluting their communities. “Drinking Coke is like drinking farmers’ blood,” said one marcher. India has revoked plant licenses due to drought. Yet at the same time, to the dismay of villagers, governments like China and India hand out environmental awards to the local factories.
The WWF and Coke program has a five-point mission:
1 Conserve the world’s important freshwater basins. They have targeted six areas around the world.
2 Improve water efficiency inside Coke.
3 Reduce the company’s carbon emissions
4 Promote sustainable agriculture. Why this? Because agriculture (sugar cane in this case) uses a large portion of the world’s water supply – 70%, according to Coke.
5 Inspire a global movement to conserve water
You can’t argue with any of these goals, except, of course, the irony of the source – Coca-Cola — which happens to be a deplorable offender and that it needs to create these goals.
They will continue to ravage and plunder the earth, but at a 5% slower pace. So it’s a game we’re still losing, only a drop slower.
To take a giant leap, we need to ask ourselves the point of a company like Coke. It’s an unnecessary product, an unhealthy indulgence, a psychologically addictive vice, a blemish on capitalism’s better intentions. It’s inherent of any company to fight for its survival, but it may incumbent upon us – as part of our strategic effort to save the planet – that we recognize and “out” the conglomerates that prosper at our expense
Perhaps we need to aim higher. Yes, companies like Coca-Cola are heading in the right direction, saying the right green things, and following up slowly. Ultimately, though, they need to be pressured into standing up and saying, “We manufacture artificial sugar water, we know we’re a parasitic corporation, and we have a five-year plan to re-employ our workforce as we dwindle down to nothing.”
