Returnable plastic cups… filled with single-use plastic bottles. At many Olympic sites, the sponsor of the Paris Olympics, Coca-Cola, uses this material, of which it is a huge emitter, due, according to it, to “technical and logistical constraints”.
In the tennis den at Roland-Garros, in that of boxing at Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), for the basketball quarter-finals at Bercy on Tuesday morning, the scene is repeated: plastic bottles filled with Fanta, Sprite or Coca-Cola, the only ones that can be sold in the Olympic venues, are emptied into cups with a deposit of 2 euros (3 Canadian dollars).
The bottles are immediately thrown into sorting bags at the foot of the sales kiosks.
As early as the end of June, environmental protection associations such as the France Nature Environnement (FNE) network denounced “unjustified plastic pollution” on the part of one of the largest users of plastic in the world.
Even if the bottles are sorted for recycling, they have an impact on the planet, because of the production (often from oil), the transport and the energy consumed for recycling, whereas the use of fountains, like in fast food restaurants, would have required much less materials.
These containers are at the heart of Coca-Cola’s business model: in its financial documentation, the group indicates that it produced around 134 billion plastic bottles in 2022 (the latest year available), or 4,250 every second. However, in many countries, recycling is lacking and the bottles end up in landfills or in the environment.
Storage problems?
In his Atlas of plastic dating from 2020, the German Heinrich-Böll Foundation, close to the Alliance 90 / The Greens party, estimated that the Atlanta giant produced 3 million tonnes of waste from plastic packaging each year and that, put end to end, the plastic bottles produced in 2019 represented 31 round trips between Earth and the Moon.
While the Paris Games aim to reduce the plastic footprint of this type of event, why fill the returnable cups “with bottles and not fountains?” asks MP (Modem) Philippe Bolo, author of several parliamentary reports on plastic pollution, quoted by the daily newspaper The world.
The American giant, which adopted the plastic bottle in 1978, explained in a press release on Friday that it was necessary to find the “best conditions of safety and food quality”, but also to “adapt to each site and its technical and logistical constraints”, citing among these the arrivals of water and electricity, the “available surface area”, or the “storage space”.
He assures that nearly 10 million drinks, or “more than half” of all those served to the general public, will be “without single-use plastic”.
Better financial results
Coca-Cola also claims that around 6.2 million drinks are served in bottles “made mostly of recycled PET plastic”. It aims to have “all bottle bodies across all formats made of 100% recycled plastic” by 2030.
The group finally argues that collecting the bottles during service ensures “that they are sorted and compacted in order to be recycled”.
“Seven hundred fountains have been deployed,” assured Georgina Grenon, director of “environmental excellence” for Paris 2024 during a press briefing on Tuesday. She expressed confidence in reaching a target of “50% reduction in single-use plastic”, thanks to the fountains and glass bottles, compared to the London Games in 2012.
Reducing the use of single-use bottles is at the heart of the standoff between 175 countries trying to finalize the first global treaty against plastic pollution this year: manufacturers and their countries refuse any reduction in production and affirm that recycling will prevent plastics from ending up in the ocean.
Financially, the year is good for Coca-Cola, with a better-than-expected second quarter of 2024 and raised financial targets.
On the other hand, it is the subject of a very significant tax adjustment in the United States of at least six billion dollars. The soda giant, some of whose subsidiaries are also in the sights of the French tax authorities, has indicated that it will appeal.