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Pepsi and Coke have pledged to zero out their emissions in the coming decades, but to meet the goals, they’ll need to fix a problem they helped create: the dismal recycling rate in the US.
When Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr Pepper calculated their carbon emissions for 2020, the results were startling: The world’s three biggest soft-drink companies combined to pour 121 million tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere–eclipsing the entire climate footprint of Belgium.
Now the soda giants are promising to make dramatic climate improvements. Pepsi and Coke have vowed to zero out all their emissions in the coming decades, while Dr Pepper pledged to cut climate pollutants by at least 15% by 2030.
But to make meaningful headway on their climate goals, the beverage companies will first need to surmount a pernicious problem that they’ve helped create: the dismal rate of recycling in the US.
The massive production of plastic bottles is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the largest contributors to the beverage industry’s climate footprint. Most of the plastic is polyethylene terephthalate, or “PET,” whose ingredients are derived from petroleum and natural gas, before undergoing multiple energy-intensive processes.
Each year, beverage companies in the US produce about 100 billion of these plastic bottles to sell their soda, water, energy drinks, and juices. Globally, Coca-Cola Co. alone churned out 125 billion plastic bottles last year–about 4,000 each second. The production and disposal of this avalanche of plastic accounts for 30% of Coke’s carbon footprint, or about 15 million tons a year. That’s equal to the climate pollution from one of the dirtiest coal-burning power plants.
It also results in a mind-boggling amount of waste. Just 26.6% of PET bottles were recycled in the US in 2020, with the rest incinerated, stuffed into landfills, or tossed aside as litter, according to the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR). In some parts of the country, the picture is even more unsightly. In Miami-Dade County, Florida’s most-populated county, just one in 100 plastic bottles is recycled. Overall, the recycling rate in the US has languished below 30% for most of the past two decades and badly trails most other nations, such as Lithuania (90%), Sweden (86%), and Mexico (53%). “The US is, by a country mile, the most wasteful,” says Elizabeth Balkan, director of North American operations at Reloop Platform, a nonprofit that combats packaging pollution.
All this waste is a huge missed opportunity for the climate. When plastic soda bottles are recycled, they’re turned into a variety of new materials, including carpets, clothing, deli containers, and even new soda bottles. PET bottles made from recycled plastic cause only 40% as many heat-trapping gases as bottles made from virgin plastic, according to an analysis by Franklin Associates, a solid waste consulting firm.
Spotting a ripe opportunity to slash their footprints, soft-drink companies have pounced with promises to use vastly more recycled PET in their bottles. Coke, Dr Pepper, and Pepsi pledged to source a quarter of their plastic packaging from recycled materials by 2025, with Coke and Pepsi vowing to hit 50% by 2030. (Today, Coke is at 13.6%, Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. is at 11%, and PepsiCo Inc. is at 6%.)
But the country’s abysmal recycling record means there’s nowhere near enough bottles being recovered for the beverage companies to hit their goals. NAPCOR estimates the long-stagnant US recycling rate would need to somehow double by 2025 and triple by 2030 to generate ample supply for the industry pledges. “The most critical factor is the availability of bottles,” says Alexandra Tennant, plastics recycling analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd.
But it’s the soft-drink industry itself that bears much responsibility for this shortfall. For decades, the industry has ferociously battled proposals that would increase recycling of their containers. Since 1971, for instance, 10 states have enacted so-called bottle bills, which add a 5- or 10-cent deposit to beverage containers. Customers pay the extra charge upfront and collect the money back when they return their bottles. Putting a value on empty containers leads to much higher recycling rates: PET bottles are recovered at a 57% clip in bottle-bill states, vs. 17% in others, according to the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute.
Despite this clear success, beverage companies for decades have teamed up with other industries, such as grocers and waste haulers, to kill similar proposals in dozens of other states, calling deposit systems an ineffective solution and an unfair tax that dampens sales of their products and hurts the economy. No state proposal has survived this gauntlet of opposition since Hawaii passed its bottle bill in 2002. “It gives them a whole new level of responsibility that they have avoided in these 40 other states,” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency. “They just don’t want the added expense.”
Coke, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper all said in written responses to questions that they’re serious about innovating their packaging to reduce waste and get more of their containers back. And while industry officials acknowledge they’ve opposed bottle bills for years, they say they’ve shifted their stance and are open to all potential solutions to meet their goals. “We are working with environmental partners and legislators across the country who agree the status quo is not acceptable and that we can do far better,” said William Dermody, vice president for public affairs at industry group American Beverage, in a written statement.
Many lawmakers working to address the growing plastic waste problem, however, still encounter pushback from the beverage industry. “They’re talking out of both sides of their mouth,” says Sara Love, a delegate in Maryland’s state legislature, who recently proposed a law that would boost recycling by adding 10-cent deposits to beverage bottles there. “They fight it, they don’t want it. Instead, they make these pledges that no one holds them accountable for.”
For the roughly one-quarter of plastic bottles that actually get recycled in the US, they’re packed into tightly bundled bales, each the size of a compact car, and shipped to plants like the one in Vernon, Calif., a gritty industrial suburb a few miles from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.
Here, inside a thrumming, cavernous building the size of an airplane hangar, rPlanet Earth takes in about 2 billion used PET bottles every year from recycling programs around the state. Amid a deafening roar of industrial motors, bottles rattle and bounce along conveyor belts that snake for three-quarters of a mile through the facility, where they’re sorted, shredded, washed, and melted. About 20 hours later, the recycled plastic emerges as new cups, deli containers, or “preforms,” the test tube-size containers that are later blown into plastic bottles.
In a carpeted conference room overlooking the plant’s sprawling, neatly swept floor, Bob Daviduk, rPlanet Earth’s chief executive officer, says the company sells its preforms to bottling companies who use them to package drinks for major brands. But he declines to name specific customers, calling it sensitive business information.
Since he launched the plant in 2019, Daviduk has publicly discussed his ambitions to build at least three more plastic recycling facilities elsewhere in the US. But each plant costs about $200 million, and rPlanet Earth has yet to select a location for the next one. A central challenge is the scarcity of recovered plastic bottles makes it hard to get a reliable and affordable supply. “That’s the primary obstacle,” he says. “We need more material.”
Until dozens of more plants are built, the beverage industry’s pledges are likely to fall short. “We’ve got a major crisis,” says Omar Abuaita, chief executive of Evergreen Recycling, which operates four plants in North America that each year turn 11 billion used PET bottles into recycled plastic resin, most of which ends up in new bottles. “Where do you get the raw material you need?”
Soft-drink bottles weren’t predestined to become the massive climate problem they are today. A century ago, Coke bottlers pioneered the first deposit systems, charging an extra penny or two for each glass bottle. Customers would retrieve the money when they returned their bottles to the store.
By the late 1940s, soft-drink bottles in the US had a return rate as high as 96%. That decade, Coke’s glass bottles made an average of 22 round trips from the bottler to the consumer and back to the bottler again, according to Citizen Coke, a book by Ohio State University environmental historian Bartow J. Elmore.
When Coke and other soft-drink makers began switching to steel and aluminum cans in the 1960s–and, later, the ubiquitous plastic bottles of today–the resulting scourge of litter sparked a backlash. Activists, for years, urged consumers to mail their empty soda containers back to Coke’s chairman with a message to “take it back and use it again!”
Beverage companies countered with what would become their playbook for decades to come. Instead of taking ownership for the huge amount of waste that accompanied their shift to single-use containers, they worked to create the perception that this was the public’s responsibility. Coke, for instance, launched an ad campaign in the early 1970s showing an attractive young woman bending down to pick up litter. “Bend a little,” urged one such billboard in big bold letters. “Keep America green and clean.”
The industry paired this message with fierce opposition to legislative attempts to fix the growing mess. In 1970, voters in Washington state almost passed a law to ban nonreturnable bottles but fell just votes short after pushback from beverage makers. When Oregon enacted the nation’s first-ever bottle bill a year later, adding a five-cent deposit on bottles, the state’s attorney general marveled at the political dustup: “I have never seen as much pressure exerted by so many vested interests against a single bill,” he said.
In 1990, with growing angst about overflowing landfills, Coke unveiled the first of many promises by beverage companies to ramp up the use of recycled plastic in their containers. It vowed to sell bottles made with 25% recycled material–a figure that’s identical to today’s pledges, which the soft-drink companies now say they’ll reach by 2025, some 35 years after Coke’s initial goal.
After Coke missed that original goal, citing the higher cost of recycled plastic, beverage companies every few years unfurled new ill-fated pledges. Coke promised in 2007 to recycle or reuse 100% of its PET bottles in the US, while PepsiCo in 2010 said it would increase the recycling rate of beverage containers in the US to 50% by 2018. These goals placated activists and garnered favorable press coverage, but the recycling rate for PET bottles barely budged, inching from 24.6% in 2007 to 29.1% in 2010 to 26.6% in 2020, according to NAPCOR. “The one thing they’re good at recycling is press releases,” says Susan Collins, president of the Container Recycling Institute.
Coke officials said in a written statement that their first miss “gave us an opportunity to learn” and they’re confident they can hit their future targets. Their procurement team now holds “roadmap sessions” analyzing the supply of recycled PET around the world, which, they say, will help them understand constraints and develop plans. Pepsi didn’t respond to questions about its previous missed pledges, but officials said in a written statement that it will “continue to drive packaging innovation and advocate for smart policies that drive circularity and reduce waste.”
The beverage industry’s decades of defiance appeared ready to crack in 2019. With soft-drink companies putting forward increasingly ambitious climate targets, it was impossible to ignore the emissions from their enormous consumption of virgin plastic. In a statement that year to the New York Times, American Beverage suggested for the first time that it might be willing to support policies that put a deposit on containers.
Katherine Lugar, American Beverage’s CEO, doubled down months later in a speech at a packaging-industry conference, declaring an end to the industry’s combative approach to such legislation. “You are going to hear a very different tone out of our industry,” she vowed. While they had opposed bottle bills in the past, she explained, “you are not going to hear an outright ‘no’ from us right now.” To hit the “bold goals” set by beverage companies to shrink their environmental footprints, they needed more bottles to be recycled. “Everything needs to be on the table,” she said.
As if to underscore this new approach, executives from Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and American Beverage crammed shoulder to shoulder onto a stage framed by American flags in October 2019. They were there to announce a new “breakthrough effort” called “Every Bottle Back.” The companies promised to contribute $100 million over the next decade to improve community recycling systems across the US. That money would be matched with an additional $300 million from outside investors and government funds. This “nearly half-billion dollars” of support would boost PET recycling by 80 million pounds per year and help the companies slash their use of virgin plastic.
American Beverage released an accompanying TV ad featuring three peppy workers wearing uniforms for Coke, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper who stand in a verdant park, surrounded by ferns and flowers. “Our bottles are made to be remade,” says the beaming Pepsi employee, who adds, in language reminiscent of the industry’s longtime message of customer responsibility: “Please help us get every bottle back.” The 30-second ad ran before last year’s Super Bowl and has since appeared 1,500 times on national television at a cost of about $5 million, according to iSpot.tv, a TV ad measurement company.
Despite the industry’s shifting rhetoric, little has been done to dramatically boost the amount of recycled plastic. With Every Bottle Back, for instance, the industry has thus far allocated only about $7.9 million in loans and grants, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Green, including interviews with most recipients.
To be sure, most of these recipients are enthused about the funds. The $166,000 grant from the campaign to Big Bear, Calif., a town 100 miles east of Los Angeles, helped it defray a quarter of the cost of upgrading 12,000 households to larger recycling carts. Among households using these bigger carts, recycling rates have climbed by about 50%, according to Jon Zamorano, Big Bear’s solid waste superintendent. “It was hugely helpful,” he says.
If the soft-drink companies were to evenly distribute $100 million over a decade, they should have allocated $27 million by now. Instead, $7.9 million is equivalent to the combined profits netted by the three soft-drink companies in just over three hours.
Even if the campaign eventually reaches its goal of recovering an additional 80 million pounds of PET each year, that would only increase the US recycling rate by just over one percentage point. Says Judith Enck of Beyond Plastics: “If they really want every bottle back, put a deposit on every bottle.”
But the beverage industry continues to fight most bottle bills, despite its newly stated openness to these solutions. Since Lugar’s speech two-and-a-half years ago, the industry has pushed back on proposals in states from Illinois to New York to Massachusetts. Most bottle bills, wrote a beverage industry lobbyist to Rhode Island lawmakers contemplating such a bill last year, “cannot be considered successful when it comes to their environmental impact.” (That’s a dubious critique, given bottles with a deposit are returned more than three-times as frequently as bottles without a deposit.)
In another criticism last year, a beverage industry lobbyist in Massachusetts pushed back against proposals there to increase that state’s deposit from five cents (unchanged since it was established 40 years ago) to a dime. Such a sizable deposit, warned the lobbyist, would wreak havoc because neighboring states had smaller deposits. This disparity would encourage customers to cross the border to buy their beverages, inflicting “severe impacts on sales” for Massachusetts bottlers. (This fails to mention the beverage industry helped create this would-be disparity by fighting similar proposals in these neighboring states.)
Dermody of American Beverage defends the industry’s progress. When it comes to the Every Bottle Back campaign, he says, “the $100 million commitment is one we’re very proud of.” He adds that they’ve committed funds to several other cities that haven’t yet been announced because the agreements can take a while to be finalized. “Sometimes you have to jump through a lot of hoops with these projects,” says Dermody. When including these unannounced recipients, he says, they’ve committed a total of $14.3 million to 22 projects so far.
Meanwhile, Dermody explains that the industry won’t just support any deposit system; it needs to be well-designed and convenient for consumers. “We’re not opposed to a fee on our bottles and cans to generate funding for an efficient system,” he says. “But the funding has to go to a system that is going to work the way everyone wants it to, to get to very high rates of recycling.”
One example Dermody and others in the industry frequently hold up is the deposit program in Oregon, which has evolved considerably since it was created a half-century ago over the beverage industry’s objections. The program is now funded and run by beverage distributors—an approach American Beverage says it supports—and has achieved recycling rates approaching 90%, near the best in the country.
But a big reason for Oregon’s high recycling rate is the program’s 10-cent deposit, which is tied with Michigan for the biggest in the country. American Beverage has yet to show support for proposals to enact 10-cent deposits elsewhere, including one modeled after the industry’s preferred system.
Take the national bottle bill included in the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act proposed by California Representative Alan Lowenthal and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley. The legislation proudly emulates the Oregon model, including a 10-cent deposit for bottles, while leaving private enterprise to run the collection system. While Dermody says the beverage industry is engaged with the lawmakers, it hasn’t backed the measure.
For the handful of plastic recyclers who are turning old PET bottles into new ones, this type of solution is the obvious answer. A 10-cent deposit on every bottle in the country would nearly triple the number of containers being recovered, says Daviduk of rPlanet Earth. The huge increase in recovered plastic would spur dozens of more recycling plants to be funded and built. And those plants would churn out desperately needed bottles made from recycled plastic–allowing the beverage giants to slash their carbon footprints.
“This isn’t complicated,” says Daviduk, stepping off the floor of his sprawling recycling facility outside Los Angeles. “You need to put a value on these containers.”