Littering the National Parks – Follow-up

An astute follower of this blog sent me an article last week that got me thinking.  It was related to my comments one week ago about the National Park Service struggling with litter in the parks, particularly the plastic water bottles.

This Guardian report tells how the Coca Cola Company increased their use of plastic single–use bottles in 2016 over the prior year by one billion.  Certainly one billion is a lot of bottles, but this is worded in a way that subtly reveals a bias.

As an example, when reporters want to portray a company as being greedy, they will report the company’s profits in the most unflattering way, not only with adjectives such as windfall or extravagant, but also by carefully choosing the numbers presented.  Even if a company’s profits decrease, the numbers for a large company can be very large.  So a decrease from $3 billion to $2 billion may be reported either as making a $1 billion less or as “a whopping $2 billion profit!”  If the same size company made only $100 last year but $200 this year, they can be honestly described as doubling profits even though they very close to losing money.  This tactic can apply to any numerical measure; presenting the numbers does not always assure objective reporting.

So the main headline announces in big, bold type, “Coca-Cola increased its production of plastic bottles by a billion last year, says Greenpeace.”  Smaller print explains they have increased total production to more than 110 billion bottles.  Now that’s really a lot of bottles!  But an increase of 1 billion on from a base of 110 billion is less than 1%.  The headline could have honestly read, “Coca-Cola increased its production of plastic bottles by less than 1% last year.”  But it’s unlikely that Greenpeace would put it that way, because they are concerned about the improper disposal of empty bottles.  The first headline makes that point more strongly.

The next question that came to mind concerned the growth of the Coca Cola market.  If their sales grew by more than 1%, then limiting the increase in bottles to less than 1% would be a step in the right direction.  This is never mentioned in the article so I had to look it up here and found that their sales actually decreased.  Even a small increase would then be a move in the wrong direction.

Finally, the crux of the Greenpeace complaint is that by flooding the world with so many bottles, Coca Cola is responsible for the fouling of beaches, parks, roadways and oceans with empty Coke bottles.  They show pictures of piles of bottles collected along the seashore.  “Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead, most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.”  Greenpeace accuses Coca Cola of not walking the walk on sustainability and urges them to increase their use of recycled plastic in bottles.

There is one flaw in this argument – the Coca Cola Company doesn’t empty bottles and throw them in the ocean, it fills bottles.  In doing so, they supply the bottles, but it’s their customers who carelessly toss them into oceans and yes, into landfills when they should be recycled.  Greenpeace tries to encourage (or shame) Coke and other soft drink companies to back negative incentives like deposit laws, as a way to coerce consumers into doing the right thing.

Responsibility is consistent in that when we don’t exercise it, advocacy groups or governments conspire to take the responsibility (and freedom) away from us or force us to comply.  The problem is ours, but the solution is theirs.