The True Story About Coca-Cola’s Plastic Fairy Tale

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Years ago, Coca-Cola excitedly debuted a new formula for its soda, dubbing it “New Coke.” Consumers hated it, and sales plummeted – a marketing fiasco.

But here comes Coke again, pushing an even worse product: “A Better Plastic Bottle,” trumpeting it as “100% Recycled.” Coke really needs an environmental PR goose-up, because today’s consumers know and care a lot about the massive plastic contamination of our planet – and Coke has been ranked as the globe’s number one plastic polluter for six years in a row!

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Problem is, the corporation’s recycling hype is a fraud, for plastic is a fossil fuel polymer that essentially is forever. Even though most of us dutifully put throw-away containers in recycling bins, the industry’s dirty secret is that 95 percent of plastics can’t be recycled, so they’re simply burned, dumped in landfills, or tossed “away.” In a February report, The Center for Climate Integrity reveals that the plastics-industrial-complex has been like Big Tobacco and Big Oil – intentionally fabricating, promoting, and profiting from a mass-market scam for decades. As the Climate Center commented, “The only thing the plastics industry has actually recycled is their lies, over and over again.”

But, taking another lesson from tobacco and oil, Big Plastic figures that if one lie stops working, tell a bigger one. So, Coca-Cola is presently gushing about “better” plastic bottles, while plastic manufacturers are so desperate to keep peddling environmental contamination that their new media blitz frantically insists, “Recycling is Real!”

Of course, their “new” claims are nothing but re-fabricated prevarications. Meanwhile, the industry is planning to dump 300 percent more plastic on us in the next few years. Hello, let’s get real – the only way to stop planet-choking plastic contamination is to stop making the stuff.

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