Last year the Laundromat sought to overshadow the Oscars, Grammies, Baftas, Golden Globes, Nobel Prizes, and other prestigious awards with the launch of its inaugural Greenwasher of the Year (GOTY). This was gratefully and tearfully accepted by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) at a glitzy star-studded event that was beamed around the world. I may have imagined that last bit. The AEPW was a worthy GOTY 2023 winner in a crowded field, with its clever use of context-free statistics, promotion of microscopically impactful local waste collection projects, and deft responsibility shifting to municipalities and end-consumers. With a membership consisting of the world’s biggest producers of raw plastics, the AEPW is a wonderful example of a misnomer.
A worthy runner-up
This year the Laundromat was tempted to nominate the equally comically named Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI). I imagine somewhere there must be a Tobacco and Booze Health Initiative, a Burglars and Thieves Home Security Association, and a Rodents and Cockroaches Pest Control Cooperative. The OGCI members are a veritable Who’s Who of Laundromat regulars like Saudi Aramco, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Under the guise of Paris Climate Agreement compliance, the organisation spends its time pushing ‘natural’ fossil gas as a low-carbon fuel, and carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) as the magical antidote to the evil effects of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, the GOTY is about excellence in greenwashing and the nomination committee (of one) feels that the OGCI members have let themselves down in that respect over the past year. Perhaps emboldened by the post-Ukraine invasion surge in oil and gas demand, many of these fossil giants have quietly dropped or shifted their carbon reduction targets. A few have seemingly given up all pretence of greenness. ExxonMobil has led the way in that respect, living its best high-carbon life with aggressive lawsuits against polite and mild-mannered shareholder attempts to steer the company towards a little bit less planet destruction. Given this lack of entirely convincing greenwashing, the OGCI must content itself with GOTY runner-up status this year.
And the winner is…
Cue a drum roll and suspenseful envelope opening…to reveal this year’s Laundromat Greenwasher of the Year! It is a major multinational company, which among other masterful greenwashing feats can boast of sponsoring COP27 despite being the planet’s biggest plastics polluter. We are of course speaking of everyone’s favourite source of tooth decay and diabetes: Coca Cola! The fizzy drink company masters all the sub-genres of greenwashing, such as greenrinsing, which involves surreptitiously changing environmental targets when it becomes too obvious to outside stakeholders that they will not be achieved. In 2022 Coca Cola committed to making 25% of its packaging reusable by 2030. Last month this commitment quietly disappeared, like one of the gas bubbles in its drinks, to be replaced by an exclusive focus on recycling.
Coca Cola should also be recognised for the loudly promoted implementation of attached bottle caps across its full range. The company presumably hopes that the irritation of being slapped on the nose by the bottle caps while drinking will remind its customers of its unwavering commitment to the environment and all things sustainable. Given that Coca Cola produces well over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles every year, throwing a few more bottle caps into a recycling system with an average global success rate of 9% seems to the GOTY committee like absolute top-drawer greenwashing.
After-party chatter
Categorically not commenting on the GOTY 2024 award Jon Woods, General Manager at Coca‑Cola Great Britain, said: “This is a small change that we hope will have a big impact, ensuring that when consumers recycle our bottles, no cap gets left behind. It’s one of many steps we’re taking towards our global commitment to help collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one that we sell by 2025, on our journey towards a World Without Waste.” This genuine and irony-free statement touches on another greenwashing sub-genre: greenshifting. This is where the responsibility for the company’s catastrophic torrent of plastic waste is shifted to the ‘consumers recycling the bottles.’
Also entirely unaware of the GOTY award, and speaking in a different context altogether, Dianna Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition said: “Coca-Cola is moving backward, doubling down on plastic ‘recycling’ and failing to reduce the amount of plastic they are producing. Their inaction is unacceptable, especially as innovative companies scale up real solutions like reuse/refill systems and non-toxic, plastic-free materials. Coca-Cola has been named as the world’s #1 Top Plastics Polluter for 6 years in a row now. While advocates have been urging the company for years to bring back refillable systems—a real solution—the company is doubling down on plastic ‘recycling,’ which is not living up to its promises and is making the plastic pollution crisis worse.
So, raise your plastic Coke bottles in a toast to Coca Cola, the Laundromat’s 2024 Greenwasher of the Year – and watch out for those pesky bottle caps!
