Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, however remote these islands may be, even on their shores there are large amounts of plastic trash. And its decomposition is extremely slow, and the mountains keep growing. Scientists from the University of Hawaii are studying the Pacific and its inhabitants and are finding more and more plastic. I have no idea what this is, but it 's definitely plastic. Jessica Perelman is a biologist. She started collecting the plastic trash she finds in the stomachs of fish. Sometimes we find plastic bags. There was one, completely crumpled, in a stomach, and then I showed her how she reacted to such a find. I was stunned. Then I started documenting, measuring, and photographing everything, and showing it to my colleagues. We were dismayed to see that the fish ingest so much trash. To her surprise, the biologist even finds plastic debris in specimens of sand eels, something the researcher considered impossible in this species. I chew all kinds of things. Sometimes we even find labels like the ones on this bottle of The Sun. What is that? A bottle label? The water label on the bloodstain found in the stomach of a sniper is a well-known brand. It's based on and is a very widespread brand of bottled water. When we find such labels, we can determine where the trash originally came from. Yes. Indeed, Dasani is one of the most widely marketed bottled water brands in the world, and even someone who has never heard the name before is sure to know the parent company, Coca-Cola. Less well-known is the fact that dozens of other brands also belong to the Coca-Cola Group, such as The Sun, Apolinário Bright, Capio, Minute Maid, Powerade, and of course, another of its best-known brands is missing. Annually, the group sells more than 120 billion bottles worldwide, which is equivalent to almost 4,000 bottles per second and consequently an immense amount of trash. In January 2018, the group promised its customers a world without waste by 2030. CEO James Quincy personally announced the ambitious plan. In January, a circular economy with value creation must be structured. A feasible property: a world without waste, in which synthetic materials are recycled almost indefinitely. Is it possible, and how seriously does the Coca-Cola group take its promise? First, we'd like to know more about how Coca-Cola has been handling the plastic waste problem so far. To find out, we travel to the country where Coca-Cola was created: the USA. Here in rural Virginia lives an expert in the beverage conglomerate's strategies. Hello everyone. Hello, Vaart. Nice to recognize you. Nice to meet you today, Sandrine. Welcome to Virginia. Thank you. It's not easy to locate you, but please stop by. Yes, thank you. Let's go. Furthermoremore is a historian and has specialized in environmental issues. His book, Citizen Coach, about the group's thoughtless policies, was a success in the USA. There, he also addresses the mountains of garbage that have been growing steadily since the 1960s. Since then, we've seen the garbage piling up. Coca-Cola has tried to provide an answer to this situation, and they are holding us responsible for these quantities of aluminum and plastic waste. What does it mean to preserve the beauty of the USA? Think of a group of bearded environmentalists, or at least that's what I thought. Everywhere in the US you see their logo; it's still very present. What's surprising is that it was founded by companies in the bottling and packaging sectors. The idea was, "Let's make consumers feel guilty. After all, they generate trash, and the industry gets its hands clean." An Indian man who looks like Calm, and who made the Keep America Beautiful ads famous in the US, is in Living Guest 2. This guy throws trash at his feet from his car, and then there's a close-up of the Indian man with tears in his eyes, and an announcer enters the scene and says " And people started the pollution. People can stop it." The message is clear. The 1970s Keep America Beautiful ad hasn't stopped growing. Today, there are practically identical organizations all over the world, and they all receive support from Coca-Cola. The soft drink manufacturer still applies the principle of blaming others. We see this in Versailles, where, exceptionally, we're not going to visit the palace but to attend a conference at the city hall. The conference focuses on... in keeping cities clean, and its speakers are top-level personalities, including representatives of municipal associations from all over Europe. The final speaker and guest of honor is Stevie Robertson, director of Keep Scotland Beautiful, that is, the Scottish branch of Keep America Beautiful. Clearly a supporter of carbonated drinks. His message is almost indistinguishable from that of the Indian in tears, and I am lucky enough to be able to work for an organization in Scotland, in a part that Europe couldn't care less about. And he's going to say, "I mean, he doesn't care about his own responsibility." Again, the call for individual responsibility and not for group responsibility. Is it that he does n't consider it a problem? And I saw them drinking Coca-Cola. Aren't disposable plastic bottles also a problem? We cannot forget that plastic packaging has a very useful social function. The products are very creative, very useful, and fulfill an important function. The important thing is that everyone must take care of recycling the Coca-Cola containers. They want to recover, recycle, and reuse them. The idea is that they don't pollute the environment. In other words, Coca-Cola behaves in a way... The head of a supposed environmental protection organization, an exemplary figure, will admit that his association is funded by the soft drink consortium. We inquired after the conference. I am raising a legitimate journalistic question. I work full-time for my organization in Scotland. I am fully committed to this mission. I work pro bono, understood. I work for the Scottish government and for municipalities that pay us for what we do, also for companies. And also for companies. What is it? How long has it been? There are many: Coca-Cola, H&M, McDonald's, Willis, Starbucks—all big brand names, all big companies, and they have all learned from Coca-Cola how to evade scandal. But what if Coca-Cola really intended to change something? When in 2018 the group declared itself in favor of a world without waste, it announced a series of ambitious measures to solve the problem of plastic waste. For Coca-Cola, recycling is the right option, that is, collecting used bottles to make new bottles. Coca-Cola promised to manufacture 50 percent of its bottles with recycled material by 2030. On a global scale, it is absolutely feasible in models for China and other parts of the world that show how to give value to plastic and reuse it. It seems like a good project; however, it would be useful to know exactly how the Coca-Cola group fulfills its promises, as it is not the first time it has announced its intention to use recycled plastic. It already did so in 2008. Back then, in its sustainable development report, Coca-Cola set a goal: all its bottles would contain 25 percent recycled plastic by 2015. We tried to find these figures in the 2015 report, unfortunately in vain. Nowhere does it state that the group has fulfilled its promise. Finally, we found a figure of 12.4%. One could say that there is a percentage of recycled plastic in Coca-Cola bottles, but upon closer examination of these figures, the 12.4 percent turns out to be the total of recycled materials used plus renewable raw materials. That is to say, it is two different sources of materials. To find out what this means exactly, we met with an environmental activist who has been dedicated for some time Time to analyze the policy of the carbonated beverage group. The bus is a specialist in maritime protection; he knows how to read between the lines of Coca-Cola's statistics. Copaco describes its plastic material as renewable, obtained from plants, especially corn starch. They call their bottles " eco-friendly" and add a small inscription, but the raw materials used don't change the environmental impact at all. Even though the " eco-friendly" plastic bottles are made from plants, chemically they are identical to PET bottles made from petroleum and generate the same amount of waste. This 12.4 percent is not recycled material, then. No, it isn't. We even have an email from Coca-Cola stating that they currently only use 7 percent recycled plastic material. So, despite their 2015 target of 25 percent, the figures are far from the set goal. Environmentalists believe that Coca-Cola's recycling promises are for advertising purposes, to keep consumers buying plastic bottles when companies use enormous quantities of plastic. They sell the idea that recycling is the solution to the problem, but it's not that simple nowadays. We produce so many complex synthetic materials that it's impossible to separate them all and recycle them; it simply can't be done. So Coca-Cola is manipulating its environmental statistics, and that's not all. Inside this envelope is a folder with internal letters from Coca-Cola's lobbying group for the European Union in Brussels. All these points describe planned European Union measures that don't align with Coca-Cola's interests, such as carbon emissions trading, restrictions on caffeine levels, and a ban on advertising aimed at children under 12. This could potentially harm Coca-Cola's sales. Circled on the envelope is the word " fight back," meaning to combat these measures. These are the European Union objectives that Coca-Cola wants to prevent with its lobbying efforts. Among the measures Coca-Cola flatly rejects are stricter collection and recycling targets. And among the categories to be combated is the deposit- refund system, which works perfectly in many European countries. This system prevents packaging from ending up in the environment, but Coca-Cola opposes it. The absurdity of all this is that originally the company itself... Coca-Cola was betting on returnable bottles with good results in the 1950s. The iconic American beverage was sold only in glass bottles, for which the customer paid a kind of deposit. The empty bottles were returned to the factory where they were washed and refilled. This system, which had virtually no environmental impact, worked perfectly. However, Coca-Cola later decided to introduce plastic bottles against the express recommendation of experts. Virtually no one knows the story of the end of the returnable Coca-Cola bottle. The corporation kept it hidden for a long time. Nevertheless, there is a man who still remembers it perfectly. Today he is retired and lives modestly in the US state of Michigan. Hello, I'm Sandrine Rico. Nice to meet you. Thank you for having us. Please come in. Thank you very much. Arsene Darn was an engineer and worked for many years for the US Environmental Protection Agency. In that capacity, he was the first with a typical Coca-Cola bottle. It was this big, green, transparent, and always made of glass. This is how Darn remembers the Coca-Cola bottle from the early 1950s. In 1970, interest began to grow regarding the impact on the environment and nature. For a whole year, this engineer researched and compared the environmental pollution of glass bottles with that of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Upon concluding his analyses and complex calculations, he reached an unequivocal conclusion. The table shows that returnable glass bottles, when refilled at least 15 times, are clearly the most environmentally friendly container. Thanks to this report, Coca-Cola already knew in the early 1970s that returnable glass bottles pollute the environment much less than plastic ones. However, the company kept this information to itself. We prepared it for them, and they didn't publish it. Why not? It would have shaped their future. And you have to see how they introduced the plastic bottle alone. This has physical plastics in schools. In 1975, Coca-Cola began advertising its new plastic bottles and archived the study prepared by Arce in Dharma Fritz Lang. And if I follow, the decision was made. Coca-Cola introduced plastic bottles worldwide, and other business groups followed suit. Plastic began to appear Back in the 1980s, the problem of growing waste from factories prompted a reaction from environmentalists. Some US states wanted to make returnable bottles mandatory, but they weren't yet aware of the power of the Coca-Cola Group, which was always at the forefront of the fight against any legal measures that sought to impose a returnable bottle system or a deposit on packaging waste. Newsletters periodically celebrate the success of this battle. Why do you think the corporation is acting so forcefully against a returnable bottle system? What's the reason for establishing a deposit on bottles? It would cost them more money; it would force us to include disposal costs. After all, it's a smart market mechanism that forces the industry to solve its own waste problem. Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola Group publicly promises a world without waste. That's our goal, and its lobbying groups have been working in secret for 40 years to stop ecological alternatives to the plastic bottle. Well, ready for action! We have many questions to ask Coca-Cola. After months of negotiations, the company granted us an interview at its French headquarters. Michael Goldsman has come from the US. Specifically to answer our questions in Paris, this executive has worked for Coca-Cola since 1997, where he heads the global strategies and sustainability division. Of course, so what percentage of recycled plastic does Coca-Cola use worldwide in its bottles? The recycled plastic for 2015... now it's 2018 and the goal is far from being met. You yourselves say it's barely 7% because you couldn't reach the target; it was very difficult. You're right, we haven't reached our goals. We're aware of that; we have to improve, but with our strategy, we believe we can achieve it. But we agree that you're very far from the target. Yes, I agree with you. However, we've had this strategy since January, and it's July with Coca-Cola. That is to say, Coca-Cola has been working with a real strategy since January 2018. They've been participating in collection and recycling systems in many countries. In France, we made investments back in 2012, so it's nothing new. But the strategy dates back to January 2018. The people in this document... yes, however, it doesn't answer our... The current strategy in 2016 means that just two years ago in January we announced our new strategy, and this document doesn't align with our current strategy or our business policy. It's still part of the lobbying group in Brussels. Does that mean she modified this chart? Now it's different. If it's different, today we'll give you the new chart. No, I don't have a chart to give you. In two years it wasn't modified much. In 2016 you fought against this measure, and now you defend it like a charade. And we are in constant contact with third parties. We communicate our guidelines and analyze them periodically. We have decided that now the objective is to invest seriously. So on the one hand, they say they really want to achieve changes, but on the other hand, this strategic document appears, which must remain confidential, and we won't make a value judgment. We will take another trip. Tanzania, this East African country, boasts of its dreamlike landscapes, its pristine beaches, and its exciting photo opportunities. What you don't see in the advertisement is that Tanzania is the quintessential Coca-Cola country. At the bus stops, at the The red and white logo is so ubiquitous on the walls of houses or in playgrounds that one is hardly aware of it. Anyway, in Tanzania, you can still find returnable glass Coca-Cola bottles. This could be good news if it continued to be so, Moya. However, the American consortium is doing in Tanzania what it started in the US almost 50 years ago: glass is being phased out. Here, everything is new. With pride, we are accompanied by James Malaga, head of this production line where only plastic bottles come off the conveyor belt. Today, Fanta is being bottled, which, like many other carbonated beverage brands, belongs to the Boca Cola group. Tons of bottles. The employees here are only responsible for feeding the laborious machines. And this is the counter for the pineapple-shaped bottle. How many has been bottled so far? 86,340 bottles. Perhaps that's the production of two and a half hours. 86,340 bottles in two and a half hours, that is, 10 bottles per second. And only 5 years ago, here they only bottled... Glass containers, but now the glass bottle conveyor belt is practically stopped. Ah, people want to take everything. It happens that returnable bottles have to be returned, and besides, PET bottles are very aesthetically pleasing and pretty. He considers that the use of plastic has more to do with appearance than with money. People have to take care of returning glass bottles, but I don't want bottles returned to me. I just want to sell. From the point of view of the issue, plastic doesn't constitute a problem for the environment of Tanzania. It's a good business; everyone wants to do business, that's why people collect the plastic. 80% of the plastic is recycled. After the visit, we want to see this building. Truly, the country is drowning in garbage, and the supposedly good business with empty Coca-Cola bottles is as shameful as it is dirty, a task that only the poorest do. How she kills. She raises her three children alone. I don't. To be able to buy them something to eat, she collects plastic on the beach. And what type of plastic is better? The greatest demand for bottles is always for hard plastic. It's good to find some, but I grab all kinds of bottles and so far I have n't found much. Here in Tanzania, we ran into an old acquaintance: bottled water. On an 8-hour workday, plus up to 20 kilos of plastic, they pay 250 shillings per kilo. In euros, that's 8 cents, meaning their daily wage doesn't even reach two euros if the day was productive. Because I do this, well, to earn some money, so don't think that... With this one can live, but I have to. These last few months have been difficult because prices are rock bottom, because they've fallen because there's too much plastic. Too much plastic ruins the prices, and there are too many poor collectors like Mata who have no other income. Look at the country's largest garbage dump in Dar es Salaam, the economic center of Tanzania. Everyone rushes to the truck as soon as they see it arrive. Plastic bottles, plastic bottles. These kinds of bottles are the best: clean, transparent, and made of rigid plastic. They're not good, but you have to spend a lot of time looking for them because they're hard to find. This system sets the prices, and when only one of us says yes, we have to resign ourselves. It's time to clean the camera lens and see beyond. Who are the ones dictating the ridiculous prices to the collectors and condemning them to a life of bitter poverty? One of the buyers is based in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. He's the country's main intermediary trading in used plastic. On the company's large property, the view is Surreal A gigantic mountain of empty bottles. Each of the workers here carries up to 70 kilos of plastic. Human ants going up and down with a load heavier than themselves. How do they endure it? And here the biggest problem is the sun. The sun is merciless. Everything is from an unimaginable society, and we collect here with our bare hands, without gloves. I mean, recycling companies. And until recently, this material was exported to China, the world's largest market for used plastic, but that's over. As the manager explained to us yesterday, I heard a collector say that prices have been rock bottom for a few months now because of Chinese companies in America and Malaysia. But most of the plastic waste continues to accumulate, burning or ending up in the sea. We're interested to know what Michael Goldsman has to say about this. He's the director of Coca-Cola's environmental policy division. I would gladly show him some scenes from our most recent filming. Six years ago, Coca-Cola didn't sell a single plastic bottle. They were all bottles. Returnable glass bottles are common, but today Coca-Cola also relies on plastic bottles in Tanzania. This decision depends on the consumer. All types of containers create contrast. The consumer wants to be able to carry their drinks in lighter containers. That means we have to guarantee the collection of these bottles, and we want to do it. You converted production to plastic six years ago, so why didn't you create a collection system then? The important thing is that we're doing it now. I don't think it's important that nothing happened for six years. You introduced plastic bottles without worrying about collection and recycling, and today we have a new strategy. We want to establish a circular economy. By circular economy, you're essentially referring to the same thing as a recycling economy. I'd like you to listen to a testimony. She describes how this branch of the economy is currently in Tanzania: " I do this to earn some money. Don't think you can live on this." What do you think? Our bottles can't be worth more. All used PET bottles have value. Don't you think Coca-Cola made a mistake in Tanzania? I don't like seeing these kinds of images; nobody likes them. It's clear to me that there are objections to the materials. synthetics and we respond with the system that, well, we haven't started the project yet, but we have plans. That means they haven't invested anything yet. We haven't invested anything yet. We want to apply the same model in Tanzania to promote PET recycling as in South Africa, and in a year we'll be able to see it in operation. Coca-Cola promises a world without waste, in the words of its executive James Quinn: "Yes, I really believe a world without plastic is possible. Our vision is not a world without plastic. We see the advantages that plastic offers, for example, low weight, but we also see disadvantages, so we want to implement certain systems to be able to keep it under control." That's how the future of Coca-Cola looks. Even more plastic bottles. The consortium is further than ever from its promises of a world without waste with a circular economy, and just during the time this documentary aired, Coca-Cola sold more than 10 million bottles.