Coca Cola is the best when it comes to drinks, so naturally it's pollution footprint among the biggest. Eliminating Coca Cola tomorrow would just mean shittier soda for humanity, not less pollution.

Learn to drink water, it takes some time to get used to it and appreciate it, but it's so much better than that <expletive>.

Your parties must be fun! Unfortunately chiding strangers on the net won't help the global consumption of soda.

Where have I chided you?

It's not like Coca-Cola goes around and throws their cans or bottles in nature...

> It's not like Coca-Cola goes around and throws their cans or bottles in nature

They as well could.

They choose to profit from producing the stuff.

They could as well use glass as they did for decades, or sell reusable bottles and refill those. They choose to operate in countries without proper waste management knowing where that trash will end up, and are operating there anyway.

They know the damage they're causing, they've been influencing policies for decades with "reuse, recycle, reduce", even if they knew that recycling doesn't work and that just 8% of plastic ever made was recycled.

The (microplasti) pollution problem is huge, and damage they're causing is immense.

They are the (major) symptom of the problem that needs solving.

When I was a kid, coca cola products in my country came in glass bottles that you had to leave a refundable deposit to carry away, creating an incentive to keep them out of the garbage and take them back. By moving away from this, yes, they are responsible to some degree for the plastic pollution.

This exists for plastic bottles as well, your country just didn't implement it as they did for glass. According to your own argument, your country is now responsible to some degree for the plastic pollution.

There are microplastics in the contents of those bottles. Just by opening those bottles you're releasing countless microplastics into the air. Even if we'd manage to collect all those bottles, it would still pollute.

Yes, governments are among those responsible.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61146-4

Microplastics generated when opening plastic packaging

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237900-just-opening-a-...

Just opening a plastic bottle can release thousands of microplastics

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/15/micropla...

WHO launches health review after microplastics found in 90% of bottled water This article is more than 5 years old

Researchers find levels of plastic fibres in popular bottled water brands could be twice as high as those found in tap water

What do you mean? I can take my plastic bottles back to the seller to get 10 cents per bottle back on the purchase (that's what it was when I was a kid, a non-trivial amount back then), and the bottle will be cleaned and reused without grinding the? Because that's what I meant.

Sending plastic bottles to recycling is pointless and doesn't work, anywhere.

> Coca Cola is one of the main plastic polluters of our oceans.

Weird. This source[1] claims that the majority of ocean plastic pollution is from fishing equipment.

>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/07/coca-col...

>Companies accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, with Coca-Cola ranked No 1 for most littered products

>https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/11/coca-cola-m...

Both of these are methodologically flawed because they only sample litter that can be identified. Plastic bottles are readily identifiable and can be attributed to a company. The same can't be said for tires or cigarette butts.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/08/Great-Pacific-Gar...

> Weird. This source[1] claims that the majority of ocean plastic pollution is from fishing equipment

You're right. One is plastic on the beaches in the US, the second is great pacific garbage patch.

> Both of these are methodologically flawed because they only sample litter that can be identified.

They don't mask that (from the first article):

"The annual audit, undertaken by 15,000 volunteers around the world, identifies the largest number of plastic products from global brands found in the highest number of countries. This year they collected 346,494 pieces of plastic waste, 63% of which was marked clearly with a consumer brand."

It's flawed and not complete, but it's data. We don't have better data yet, AFAIK.

> Coca-Cola most common littered brand on UK beaches, says study

It's also the most popular soda brands in the country. Maybe there is a correlation?

People live in cities? Who knew?!

>Coca Cola is one of the main plastic polluters of our oceans.

In the unlikely event that you're correct about Coca-Cola products being the main polluters, is it their responsibility to make sure customers don't litter?

Food and drink products are going to cause the most pollution compared to other products, because food and drinks are consumed with a higher frequency than anything thing else on the planet.

However, being a manufacturer of these products is not the same thing as being a polluter. The polluters are the people doing the actual polluting, by throwing the products into the rivers and oceans.

The vast majority of plastic in the ocean comes from rivers, and a small number of rivers are responsible for the vast majority of river-borne plastic.[0]

The top 10 most polluted rivers do the lion's share of the work, and 8 of them are located in Asia. None are in the west. Even if you look at the top 1000 most pollution-causing rivers, only 1 is in the US and only a few are in Europe.[1]

These disparate results come despite the fact that the US is one of the highest consumers of Coca-Cola products. This suggests that pollution has more to do with societies than companies.

As fashionable as it is to hate on corporations and place the blame at their feet, it's not their job to police pollution, nor or they incentivized to do so. Shaming them will be ineffective, and if we truly care about the planet, we should try to be effective.

Luckily, there is an appropriate target for our ire and suggestions, a target which is both richer and more powerful than every corporation combined, and which is responsible for keeping things clean, and which is accountable to public opinion, and that target is called government.

Societies that are clean are societies that hold their governments accountable to holding polluters accountable, whether they're corporations or individuals. So, in my opinion, our efforts are best directed at governments.

Warren Buffett is not the villain here, and nor is Coca-Cola. Even in a world without Coca-Cola, we'd likely have another behemoth in its place, or (worse) a million little distributors contributing equally (likely more) to pollution, but without a single name by which we can identify them, nor a single entity by which we can effectively police them.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

[1] https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/

Sorry, but (sugary) drinks in plastic bottles are just bullshit products that should not exist at all.

Production costs are almost zero, health and environmental impacts are extreme.

Warren Buffett is the villain. Coca-Cola too. Governments as well. The system as well.

I hope that shaming works. Nothing else has brought any change yet.

You're missing what was literally the entire point of my comment, which is that government action has worked. Shaming the wrong party does not work, regardless of your personal opinion on what the rest of humanity "should" enjoy consuming.

> government action has worked

I don't think that it did. And I don't care about what the humanity is consuming, as long as it doesn't pollute the world excessively.

Your rights end where my rights begin, etc.

What do you think explains why America has none of the top 10 polluting rivers? And only one of the top 1000? Despite the fact that we use massive amounts of plastic relative to most other countries, and that we are the headquarters of Coca-Cola.

It's laws. It's society. It's government. It's mobilization by citizens to get the government to regulate waste disposal -- to make improper disposal of waste illegal, and to fund the creation of easily-accessible environmentally-friendly waste disposal mechanisms.

Consuming soft drinks does not pollute the environment. Throwing bottles into rivers does. Your disdain for soft drinks has you mistaking these for the same thing.

Maybe. Or maybe you export your trash to other countries, to whomever takes it for the least amount of money, and they dump it into the river. We'll never know.

I'm not against soft drinks, again. I'm against plastic pollution, be it from plastic bottles or from textiles or packaging materials or whatever.

Producing plastic causes plastic pollution, no matter how it's disposed of.

What part of "If you think DQ and Coca Cola are bad for society I can see that" don't you understand?