Coke and Pepsi: sweet, fizzy and not so nice

The soft drink giants use their wealth and power to avoid responsibility for their harmful products and the pollution they cause

I drank a lot of soda pop when I was a kid. I imagine most kids do. My father had a fondness for RC Cola, and I can't remember a time when our refrigerator did not have at least a couple of bottles of RC inside. Dr. Pepper was a favorite, and summers weren’t complete without a surfeit of root beer floats. Still today, I sometimes like to have a soda with a hamburger or hot dog, sipped through a straw with plenty of ice.

This stuff isn’t good for you and isn’t good for the environment either

Having a soda pop once in a while is a real treat, but drinking lots of it can be bad for you. As long ago as 1942, the American Medical Association recommended limiting the intake of soft drinks, because of their sugar content. As your mother told you, soda pop can give you cavities. A recent study in Australia found that drinking a lot of sugar-sweetened beverages was associated with obesity, heart disease, and depression. And if you think you’re getting off easy with the zero-calorie kind, Type 2 Diabetes was associated with drinking artificially sweetened drinks. What’s more, drinking soda pop can shorten your life. Science links soda pop with a higher risk of death from all causes.

Then there is all that plastic. Every single minute across the globe, more than one million plastic bottles are sold. The soft drink industry is one of the greatest contributors to plastic pollution in the world’s seas and oceans. In the Ocean Conservancy’s annual September beach cleanups conducted in more than 100 countries, plastic bottles and bottle caps are the third and fourth most collected plastic trash.

Poorer countries are more likely to bear the brunt of plastic pollution because many lack the waste management infrastructure to handle the immense volume of waste. Large amounts of plastic waste flow from prosperous countries to poorer ones. With no capacity to recycle the plastic and lacking landfill capacity, lots and lots of those bottles that once held our soda pop are burned, contributing significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions.

Big Soda is big!

A recent study, published in Globalization and Health looked at why the soft drink industry, as well as bottled water companies, have been allowed to make us humans and our planet less healthy. There is Big Pharma, Big Oil, and when it comes to Big Soda, there are two players, Coke and Pepsi. In 2020 Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo individually and together held the largest market share of the global soft drink market. Coke had 20.8 percent of the market and Pepsi held 10 percent. Combined, their share of the market was greater than the next 78 soft drink firms taken together. They are the 37th and 50th largest publicly listed corporations in the world.

It is also important to consider market dominance. Of the 98 countries in this study, Coke was the leader in 83 countries and second in the rest. Pepsi led in 12 countries. Only the Dominican Republic, Angola, and Myanmar had soft drink leaders other than Pepsi and Coke.

Pepsi and Coke have been expanding their markets to poor and moderately poor countries. From 2006 to 2020, total revenue from poor countries increased eightfold for both companies and fourfold from moderately poor countries. Revenues from the U.S. and the rest of the world increased as well.

Power

As the investigators point out, all this market share and money give the two giants a lot of clout. They spend an enormous amount on advertising. Between 1980 and 2019 Coke spent $90.5 billion on advertising, nearly nine times more than the industry average. Pepsi spent $74.9 billion, 7.4 times the industry average.

Pepsi and Coke spend lots of money to convince you to buy their colas

Their gigantic market share also means they have a lot of money to spend on lobbying, which leads to favorable legislation. From 1970 to 2016 the effective tax rate for Pepsi declined from 40 to 25 percent, and Coke declined from 50 to 19 percent. (Coke and Pepsi are not alone, it should be kept in mind. Other businesses saw their taxes decline in the same time frame.) Such clout also leads to what is called “legislative capture” or what has been known for centuries as plain old corruption. Through legislative capture, proposed laws to limit the amount of sugar in drinks, or to require companies like Coke and Pepsi to clean up their plastic bottle pollution never see the light of day, or, if passed, are considerably watered down.

As Naomi Oreskes chronicles in Merchants of Doubt, Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industries funneled enormous amounts of money into “research” that obfuscated results that their products caused cancer or warmed the globe. Big Soda has done the same. Between 2010 and 2019, Coke financed “research” to the tune of $10 million to shift the blame for diet-related chronic diseases away from its sugary products. An inquiry sponsored by Right to Know, an investigative public health and consumer group, analyzed more than 18,000 emails between Coca-Cola, West Virginia University, and the University of Colorado. Results indicated that the universities formed part of a “front group” called Global Energy Balance Network that downplayed the link between sugary drinks and obesity.

A 50 year old Coke ad that people still talk about. How can something so sweet with a song so pleasant be so bad for you and the environment?

Back to plastic, Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo are the world’s two largest manufacturers of plastic packaging. Most of those millions of bottles clogging up the world’s waterways and oceans come from Coke and Pepsi. Taken together, the two cola giants produce at least 5.8 million tons of plastic packaging every year, with about 370,000 tons polluting ecosystems.

As far as taking responsibility for their plastic pollution, Big Soda replies with, “We don’t care.” They also follow up with, “And you can’t make us!” For most of us, once we empty a bottle of Coke or Pepsi, it’s our responsibility to find a proper recycling receptacle for it. In a few places, however, laws are in place to make it the responsibility of the beverage companies for their waste. Known as “Bottle Bills,” they require a deposit on the bottles, reimbursed when the consumer returns the bottle for recycling. Beverage containers in states with bottle bills are returned at about 60 percent, while states without them have a return rate of only 24 percent.

With all their money and clout, Big Soda has fought any efforts for bottle bills. Soon after Vermont passed the first bottle bill, The American Can Company and other corporations founded Keep America Beautiful. Coke and Pepsi soon joined up. Portraying themselves as anti-litter, the organization has actually worked to deter bottle bills and other legislation that would make companies responsible for their waste. Keep America Beautiful is most famous for the “Crying Indian” PSA that fooled an entire generation into thinking that all that trash was their fault.

The famous “Crying Indian” ad. Ask not for whom the Indian cries. He cries because he’s a paid actor in an ad to convince you that all that packaging produced by big companies is your problem, not theirs.

Coke and Pepsi use other tactics to avoid responsibility for their plastic pollution. Among the strategies used by Big Soda is to offer funds for recycling to states and municipalities on the condition that they don’t pass bottle bills. And their ads and the ads from their front groups like Keep America Beautiful are quite successful at keeping recycling laws in their favor.

Things should change, but they won’t until we get get money out of politics—or at least elect officials who won’t bend to the will of Big Soda.