Transcripts For RT Documentary 20240714

Marine animals not plastic at least in theory. No idea what that is. But its certainly plastic. And Jessica Perelman is a biologist accustomed to finding plastic in fish stomachs she has started a very unique collection. Of casually often plastic bags. Just as off of a stomach when i found it had no idea what it wasnt all that it just. Or did you react when you find this installment i was shocked i started documenting it measuring it taking photos showing whoever else was around in the lab and we were kind of. We were just there shocked to think that these fish are are really ingesting that i mean. To her disbelief the scientist has found plastic in a non likely specimen known as the fish. The young were not expecting such a surprising discovery when she began this piece is. Fish live at a depth of about 200 to 400 meters and theyre clearly coming in contact with plastic and it appears that plastic is is truly a deeper problem that we might have imagined. Even swimming at these depths fish manages to swallow trivial plastic objects. I mean occasionally you might find a brand name such as this. Bottle label. What is this so this is a label from a water bottle dishonor bottle clearly and found amongst the lancet. Is a. Design design is a pretty well known. Bottled water company. You know finding finding a label such as this in the stomachs makes it that easy to determine where you know where it may have originated. This is always more to use than just. Just water in the bottle. In fact sonny is one of the worlds best selling brands. And if youre not familiar with you will certainly know the name of the group behind it the Cocacola Company. Everyone knows cocacola but not everyone necessarily knows that the group is in china. Dozens of other brands just sunny as part of the Cocacola Company and sprite 2 there is also minute maid powerade and of course from one of the companys flagship brands. Every year the group sells more than 120000000000. 00 bottles across the globe thats almost 2000 bottles a 2nd and this mass production is creating a devastating mass pollution. In january 28th in the multinational made a bold announcement by 2030 the brand is promising a World Without waste. And its James Quincey cocacola c. E. O. Who is leading the movement. What we need to create is the circular color we need to create value for that theres absolutely doable a World Without waste thanks to unlimited Plastic Recycling but how reliable are the promises that this multinational can recycling really make this problem go away. With plastic becoming a global catastrophe reinvestigated the companys promises and on competence secret strategy which contradicts that convincing prejudice and on up as one of those we dont go to the final results is that no effect on the political focus for decades the multinational has been aware of the damage that its plastic bottles off capable of causing but responsibility has never appeared to for long then. What is the reason behind this because ultimately it means it means higher costs for them in africa far from the soda giants american headquarters we are going to expose the truth behind the socalled recycling economy that coke is trying to promote and the somebody who. Only going to. Get to see this particular motel yet again thats a night to. Come on one last drink for the road welcome to the Wonderful World of the plastic promises if the Cocacola Company. Cocacola and plastic have a longstanding relationship and one that is full of surprises. To find out more we traveled to the United States to meet a man who is well informed on the subject he lives in this small house in the genea. I got back nice to you nice to meet you yeah really welcome to. You know this if we go to 5. I doubt i doubt one of the drivers got that or wanted to come on out yeah. But elmo is a historian. Hes the author of a book about cocacola a best seller it retraces the multinationals and time environmentalists strategy particularly from the sixtys on woods when past it began to revolutionize Consumer Society we began to see massive amounts of litter piling up around the country cocacola tried to respond to this wow were getting blamed for all this aluminum waste all this ultimately Plastic Waste what do we do and one of the things they did was partner with a Organization Called Keep America Beautiful what do you here Keep America Beautiful you think like wow this sounds like an organization. Started by a bunch of kind of bearded environmentalist at least thats what i thought. You know because you see the sign everywhere in the United States still a very present organization but it was founded surprisingly by the beverage burning in canning and Packaging Industries right the idea was that lets tell consumers there are the bad ones theyre the litterbug theyre throwing us away industry should be blamed for all this waste. And so this native american looking like a character from an old weston makes the Keep America Beautiful and huge that sense some people. Are bright. As worms. And this guy throws in his car he throws the packaging waist down it is feet and then and this great camera man lists the camera up towards the crying indians face and theres a tear in the snare and it comes on the screen and says. People start pollution people can stop it right and its this message. Consumers are the problem right not us industry but consumers are. Since the success of this advert in the us in the seventys Keep America Beautiful has branched out. Now there are organizations throughout the world designed using the exact same model and who is backed by the company with the red and white logo. One to stand how cocacola is recycling its reliable old consumer guru technique we have to go to their son i not to the chateau but to an event that is being held at the town. It is an important conference with several elected officials from all over europe and theyre here to speak about the cleanliness at that and its serious stuff there even discussing the color of that trash cans that have found. All the. Media is. To conclude the meeting the guest of honor makes a speech this time its the director of keep scotland beautiful an association partly financed by cocacola like Keep America Beautiful and it seems Derek Robertson is a plant of soda. And listen closely some of his slip ups are extremely telling. I have a clear well that i dont wish and saw and the thing about. The character. Is that it doesnt care we do care and what they are she. Meant it. As well if you stop thinking into something by. The emphasizing individual rather than collective responsibility clearly nothing has changed since the advertisement of the native american crime. I assume that you were drinking cocacola this morning is the single use bottled plastic of the problem today. Plastic Plastic Packaging has a very useful function in society and we need to we need to remember that the products are very creative they are very very useful and they obviously perform a function as important as how we again as individuals dispose of these packages so cocacola for example one of packaging likely want to be able to get it fiery safely i mean use it. What you dont want to say and then environment according to the head of an association which claims to fight against pollution cocacola is supposedly the example to follow but does he admit to being financed by the american multinationals he asked the question a few minutes later who is financing your targets or. Told you some answers are cut out of the budget and its. What you want to doing here i dont look i mean what im asking you these are judged until this question i see my my own guys asian and scotland as my digital ok im fundamentally fruitarian committed to that will i volunteer my saying ok. By asking the finance question we have identified it touchy subject the conflict of interest in this book of conflicts of interest do you think theres going to continue as i said to you think you are trying to create a measure of our fun site of interest about stuff like youre trying to do you think there is one. For us one source are you have sponsors again thats its a different model and im not purchased obviously not her child isnt that the secret to her doing and good humor terakhir you so if you were to see see what a serious thing. With your house of course i want an option of this crazy government discouragement s. Policies and they hired out experts and some companies and some companies and i. Like that all major one wasnt. Mcdonalds great starbucks and most of the or some big brand names. We had to insist that since the sixtys cocacola has been paid in the way for other multinationals. Magic mushrooms serious doubts of contacts used in the wrong way carry carry potential arms like any any psychoactive substance. But used in the right way they seem to have quite a. Profound therapy to potential and quite a good safety profile is while. My 7 years doing drugs my nephews was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was like an epidemic of drug abuse americas public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse he started going after the users in the prison population sewer we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill i increasingly became convinced that the war on drugs was a mistake there are countless numbers of people who are in prison for. Sins for war minor minor offenders in the drug trade its a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in waves and say bye daddy as youre walking out of a business its just it doesnt get easy. Join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and ill be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business im showbusiness ill see of that. But what if the soda giant really had decided to change a few months ago upon launching its program for a World Without waste the Company Announced a set of very ambitious measures to resolve the plastic pollution problem for cocacola the solution is recycling the concept is simple collect used bottles to make new ones out of them. Cocacola promises to put 50 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2030 and thats on a global scale. Is absolutely doable theres a model there for the chinas a lot of parts of the world on how to create value out of plastic and get it we used. Of course that would be great news. But with all that we have learned about the companys strategies we wanted to check how often they actually keep their promises the American Company has been promising to make bottles out of recycled plastic for years take the year 2008 for example in its report on Sustainable Development cocacola announced that it wanted to put 25 percent recycled plastic in all of its bottles by 2015. For a long time we sought to find any trace of this in the report from 2015. The Company Never clearly states whether or not that promise was kept we end up finding a single figure 12. 4 percent at 1st glance its easy to believe that this is the percentage of recycled plastic used by cocacola but after taking a closer look 12. 4 percent turns out to be the total percentage of recycled and renewable materials used the problem is that weve cycled and renewable plastic are 2 very different things. To decrypt the soda giants jargon we arranged a meeting with an ngo that has been interested in the Cocacola Group for a long time. And then bush is a specialist in ocean pollution and shes going to explain how the multinational. Twists words and statistics. Are best. Put just sort of the visit of. I mean. They are not. Supplanted of a country. Back to the 11th renewable plastic is essentially plastic made from a plant base but its still plastic and therefore its still bad for the environment that clears up the words now lets move on to the statistics. Not 7 vegetarian. 68 the mayor. Said for the plastic or sickly. Or labor day when youve had such an enclosure its a fundamental difference and we are clearly very far from the target from the n. G. s point of view cocacola is recycling targets off 1st and foremost a marketing ploy to ensure that the consumer keeps buying their plastic bottles. The whole lot of us you clash less volatile. Made of. A stash back to test result that sanju would have called you so to tella. The pool of call it. Says to the. Cocacola subtle statistical distortions are bad but the worst is yet to come. We uncovered something far worse in this envelope which contains dozens of letters and internal records from cocacola these documents should have remained confidential but they were published anonymously on the internet a few months ago we carefully sifted through all the information and found that we could not be further from the ambitious a World Without waste slogan. Amidst the mass of information this document caught our attention its dated from 2016 and signed by the cocacola is a lot being manager in brussels. The bullet points are all the measures that europe could adopt but which do not coincide with cocacola as interests. In the next we find Carbon Pricing restrictions on the usage of caffeine and eat you ban of advertising to children under 12. 00. In other words anything that could lower the companys turnover figure on the right theres a circle entitled fight back these are all the european measures that cocacola has decided to fight against through lobbying. And amongst the measures that cocacola downright refuses we find increased collection and recycling targets. You heard it cocacola wants to fight against increased recycling targets in europe while theyre promising the exact opposite in their public pledges sit. On the tablet. The ties in nicely. Sit out. In that fight back category we also discovered that the Company Wants to fight against the deposit system. This is one of the systems that is actually effective in combating pollution and the oldest in the game are well aware of this. Deposit system works like this when you buy your drink you pay in lets say a euro for it and you also pay an extra charge the deposit lets say 0. 20 per bottle in total it would cost you one euro 20 but if you bring back the bottle youd get your 0. 20 back and so all of a sudden no one wants to throw their bottles away anymore. And what is most ironic is that the returnable bottle is virtually how cocacola began in the fiftys a bottle of coke was not always served by a pin up girl instead it was served in a dos bottle with a deposit. So once empty the bottles would go back to the factory where they would be washed and reused this creates significantly less waste for the environment. The system worked very well but coke decided to put an end to it and use plastic instead completely disregarding one particular scientists recommendations. Would you like to know how coke decided to get rid of the return of old bottle that the company has at. Attempted to keep this story from getting out but we tracked down the only man able to tell it. Today he is enjoying a discreet retirement in michigan in the United States im going to give it to reach him nice to me its nearly thank you very much for the kind of presenter thank you thank you very much its. In this gentleman is called us and down a he what of the american environmentalists agency in familia is hes also the 1st engineer in the world to investigate the ecological impact of cocacola bottles that does a very imitation there are smaller the typical quote rattles about this this big green translucent all riskless. Over is flawless. And danny is referring to the beginning of the 70s. That was when the Cocacola Company began to show an interest in plastic and to reach out to him. What they wanted to know is if you take into account all other and environmental impacts on nature what is the best system the engineer works for over a year comparing the environmentalists impact of gloss bottles to that of any minium cans and plastic bottles he costs analyzes the data makes graphs does complex calculations and he finally comes to this conclusion a glance at the table shows that the returnable glass bottle provided it breaks through steam trips before it is discard is the ecological container proposed. Thanks to this report the Cocacola Company knows full well at the start of the seventys that returnable glass pollutes c. Then plastic. But the company would never publicly share this information. We put this together for them and they didnt publish it you know why. They were not interested in it and have everything to public see the the total picture why because they want to keep it in keep it quiet as to which way they were going to go. This is the new life white plastic bottle i watch them slowly introducing the plastic bottles easy. For someone to i even remember clearly one time going to hold going roman saying to bridget my wife i said theyre going to plaster bottle told you they would and they are not growing its just a 1st step. Serialised that 10 eco plastic bottles playlist and one last bottle. With this advert for its new plastic bottle released in 1975 cocacola varies ass and honest report once and for all. Its lifes tough its easy to let. The American Company never looks back cocacola imposes its plastic bottle everywhere and then isnt the only one flooding the market its a tidal wave from the eightys on with plastic devastates beaches. And the 1st ecologists begin to protest against pollution. Certain american states consider a forced return of the deposit. Little do they know the companys immense power. Cocacola has been a significant force behind. Fighting legislation that would put deposits on containers or put some kind of price on packaging waste there are newsletters that talk about all the successes that cocacola is having around the country and its almost like this great you know celebration letter every day every week we defeated this deposit system in this state and we defeated it here why do you think they were fighting so hard against to close that system want is the reason behind this because it ultimately means higher costs for them in the end this was a way of this was forcing them to internalize their pollution costs this was a market mechanism thats very smart to try and get industry to recognize that you have to deal with this waste. A new Foreign Policy think tank will start business challenging Foreign Policy orthodoxies it is called the Quincy Institute for responsible state this is not an ordinary think tank it is funded by charles koch and george shore host among others talk about strange bedfellows in these establishment billionaires take on the Foreign Policy long. As we speak large organize care of our own the march to the united. Player coming and particularly. You know swarming slaughtering. This is a virtual invasion of our country but so far bigger than anything they. Put up in what i meant yeah i know youre not going to part of that but they are you know its going to fit in then. Nice thing. Is you can do is you know were going to be a more rigorous you know to society. Human integrity pour out im standing here today quarter. To. Kind of issues of migrant rights and those who are impacted. By. This sacred shell mounds. Of. Russian president Vladimir Putin meets the italian Prime Minister you said become say in russia who says that sunshines are preventing italy and russia from undertaking a number of joint projects. Donald trump is accused of militarizing the u. S. Independence Day Celebrations off the plane flying visit times were put on display and a contender for the british premiership jeremy hunt sparks a storm of control after linking opposition to cherami called into anti semitism and also concentration camps across all sides become a child impersonator of americas youngest congresswoman to links to social media accounts after receiving Death Threats from some supporters of alexandria across the