It is no big secret that the Laundromat is no big fan of Coca Cola. The world’s third largest food and drink company is a key player in multiple global crises, contributing to worsening health, obesity, and climate change. It can also boast of near-permanent residence at the top of the corporate plastic polluters hit parade. As a lover of good food, the Laundromat also believes that drinking fizzy sugary Coke with a meal should be outlawed, but that is a subjective opinion and unlikely to legislated. The more than 100 billion single-use plastic bottles of Coke produced each year would tend to hint that people still like to drink the cursed stuff despite this column’s tut-tutting.
The world’s insatiable (and incomprehensible) appetite for Coke has afforded the company with immense financial clout. In late 2024 Coca Cola quietly dropped its previous commitment to make a quarter of its packaging reusable by 2030. Perhaps emboldened by the slow progress and foot-dragging involved in the negotiations over an international plastic treaty, major users and producers of plastics are merrily ramping up towards a 70% increase by 2040 versus 2020 output levels.
Meanwhile, Coca Cola seeks to assuage consumers’ fears by decorating its packaging with soothing slogans like ‘100% recycled’ and ‘100% recyclable.’ It assumes sugar-high Coke drinkers will swallow these statements as easily as the famously odd-tasting fizzy beverage and believe that the company can be trusted to take care of the problem of plastic pollution. The reality is that the global average percentage of plastic that is actually recycled consistently fails to reach double figures. Moreover, in the EU only about 30% of the bottles that are recycled are made into new bottles. More often than not the material is reused to make synthetic textiles, which cannot be further recycled and are a whole different crisis in themselves.
So, here we are: Coca Cola has greenrinsed its reusable packaging pledge and seems intent on continued production of astronomical quantities of single use plastics. The latest sustainability report on the company’s UK website is 3 years old. It has immense marketing power and does not seem to care. Its shares are held by most major institutional asset owners. What to do? Lawyer up, that’s what.
In 2023 the environmental legal NGO ClientEarth teamed up with the Environmental Coalition on Standards (ECOS) to support the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC) in its formal legal complaint to the European Commission about the misleading claims made by three food and beverage companies. On 6 May 2025 we finally learned that as a result, Coca Cola will be removing or amending the claims made on its packaging. According to ClientEarth, Coca Cola will have to clarify that bottle caps and labels are not recyclable and must also remove green imagery and symbols. The complainants successfully argued that Coca Cola was misleading its customers into believing that the recycling of bottles was a genuine solution to plastics waste.
ClientEarth lawyer Kamila Drzewicka said: “This news sends a clear signal to the entire industry confirming that misleading claims about recycling can pose a legal risk. This outcome should be seen as the floor, not the ceiling. Regulators and courts across the EU now have a clear mandate to take action against such practices, which mislead consumers and breach legal standards.”
While this David versus Goliath-style victory should be celebrated, it remains that Coca Cola has only been compelled to tone down its greenwashing rather than make real changes to its value chain. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) that is currently being phased in was successfully watered down by the food and beverage industry. As long as it continues to be legal and extremely cheap for companies like Coca Cola to sell their products in single-use plastics with no responsibility for the resulting waste mountain they will not voluntarily switch to reusable packaging or other more sustainable solutions. Let us applaud the efforts of the lawyers to hold Coca Cola to account, but how about some large institutional investors holding the fizzy drinks maker to the fire and threatening to divest from its increasingly toxic shares?
