Nothing draws more attention on beaches or in heaps of trash, landfills, and floating garbage piles in the oceans than plastic waste. The well-known soda, water, or juice bottle will certainly last hundreds of years longer than the person who consumed its contents, unless it is recycled.
Two of the most recognized companies in the United States, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble (P&G), are recycling in ambitious and sometimes innovative ways.
Coca-Cola, the largest non-alcoholic beverage company (1.9 billion beverages served daily in over 200 countries), has adopted the goal of recycling one can or bottle for every one sold by 2030. Currently, 60% are recycled.
“Bottles and cans should not harm our planet, and a world without solid waste is possible,” said James Quincey, president and CEO of Coca-Cola, at the launch of the “World Without Waste” initiative recently.
Inevitably, some Coca-Cola cans and bottles still end up in the trash, but Ben Jordan, the chief environmental policy officer
of the company’s Atlanta branch, states that their goal is to recycle the equivalent of their entire production. “We don’t care where the bottle comes from,” said Jordan. The company works with bottlers and other service providers to collect and recycle.
The plastic waste that ends up on beaches is usually so contaminated that it cannot even be included in the regular batch of suitable items for recycling. However, in 2017, P&G produced a limited edition of 170,000 Head & Shoulders shampoo containers that contained 25% plastic sourced from beaches that volunteers and NGOs removed from the French coastline. Subsequently, the company sold 50,000 units in Germany and intends to use the plastic waste found on beaches for other brands and markets.
P&G partnered in these recycling campaigns for plastic waste found on beaches with TerraCycle, a company based in Trenton, New Jersey, which works with many others aimed at finding ways to recycle items that would normally end up in the trash. Although the number one goal of companies is to profit, “they prefer to do it sustainably,” says Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle.
P&G decided to tackle the plague of beach plastic in response to a report from the World Economic Forum by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company, which warned that plastic debris could outweigh all the fish in the oceans by 2050.
Kash Rangan, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-founder of the Social Enterprise Initiative, says that multinationals “lead the environmental charges. This has become a business necessity,” not just a way to encourage charitable actions or improve their reputation. If a company causes environmental damage, watchdog experts will disclose what they find “and the brand will have problems.”
The U.S. State Department awards the Corporate Excellence Award to U.S. companies that exemplify the best ethical values in overseas operations. The 2016 winners, Bureo and Interface Inc., were honored for reducing ocean waste by recycling fishing nets from Chile and the Philippines to manufacture skateboards and carpet tiles.
Source: share.america.gov