Transcripts For RT Documentary 20240713

Everyone knows cocacola but not everyone necessarily knows that the group is in charge of dozens of other brands sunny is 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 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. And. 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 cover to secret strategy which contradicts that convincing. And on up was full of the way. They found the resources that you know affect the political philosophy 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 offering the soda giants american headquarters we are going to expose the truth behind the socalled recycling economy that coke is trying to promote in the somebody who you are going to see there but it got to get us into this particular part out yelled at us and like to. Come on one last drink for the road welcome to the Wonderful World of the plastic promises of the Cocacola Company. Cocacola and plastic have a long standing 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 only welcome to. You know the think of the 5. The drivers get thats about it come on em yeah. But elmo is a historian. Hes the author of a book about cocacola a best seller its 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 released thats what i thought. You know because you see this sign everywhere in the United States still a very present organization but it was founded surprisingly by the beverage brewing in canning and Packaging Industries right the idea was that lets tell consumers theyre the bad ones theyre the litterbugs theyre throwing this away industry shouldnt be blamed for all this waste. And so this native american looking like a character from an old weston makes the Keep America Beautiful a huge success some people. Are bright. Was one speech. And this guy throws in his car he throws the packaging ways. Down it is feet and then and this great camera man lifts 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 of. 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. To understand how cocacola is recycling its reliable old consumer guilt 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 of their talents and its serious stuff there even discussing the color of that trash cans in another town. Hall meeting. That he immediately has. To conclude the meeting the guest of honor makes a speech this time its the director of keep scotland beautiful and Association Party 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. And i have the clear well i dont wish to see all of the things out. There yet. As it does here we do care and want to hire hed be. Better. Well you can stop thinking into something by. The emphasizing individual rather than collective responsibility clearly nothing has changed since the advertisement of the native american crime. Assume that you were drinking cocacola this morning is the single use not of plastic and the problem today. Class they are 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 you me again as individuals dispose of these packages so cocacola for example one of the packaging rightly want to be able to get it fiery safely i mean use it. What you dont want to say and then fire according to the head of the next says he ation 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. No money from us is a harsh article but if it is. What you want to doing here i dont look i mean im asking you these are legit to do especially seeing my own guys asian and scotland as my digital ok im fundamentally so committed to that role 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 she of thing 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 no. One source are perhaps one source again thats its a different model but im over to start explaining her child isnt that the secret to her doing and good humor characters if you were to see see what a serious thing. To a hospital and says i want an option of this Coalition Government the scores rest policies and the high amount of extras and some companies and some companies have time. But i want you want more of them. Mcdonalds bring starbucks. Some big brand names. We had to insist since the sixtys has been paving the way for other multinationals. Facts and stacy are continuing our south american tour and as you can see behind me we are in Rio De Janeiro oh my god so beautiful so much going on this was a country in transition. Brothers see. In the. Muslim droll more than i was for the imprisoned by the regime of my life. Take a stick grab some Media Attention and its a shooting in a 16 year olds 16 Birthday Party so i think the police tell a lot of pressure. To close the case. Before he is. Just gone its like i couldnt believe those. You know so far they are all more than the sure dont want peace be with us those are all of the issues because i was standing right next to. Me for this because youve got to keep in mind the one thing doing it was 16170 so. This could lose monday night just one to 2 spear the production. To food relief. For more than. Just cause. He got a gold phone now the truth. Today there are good dentists and bad debt is the bad news in yemen the United States deems to be a threat the good those who work in syria the cia and the us military were engaged in covert actions really throughout the world. Where they were assassinating populist leaders they were backing up the right way military juntas funding and arming death squads theres no any more because theres always a small income for a really good. Profit. Is your media a reflection of reality. In a world transformed. What will make you feel safe from. Isolation full community. Are you going the right way or are you being led. Direct. What is truth whats his face. In a world corrupted you need to descend. To join us in the depths. In the shallowness. You know world of big part of the lot and conspiracy its time to wake up. The deeper to hit the stories that Mainstream Media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door. And shouting past each other its time for Critical Thinking its time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. But what if the soda giant really has 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 and other parts of the world on how to create value out of plastic and get it we use. Of course that would be great news. But with all that we have learned about the companys strategy is we wanted to check how often they actually keep their promises garak and company has been promising to make bottles out of recycled plastic the 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 so want to find any trace of this in the report from 25. 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 recycled and renewable plastic are 2 very different things. To decrypt the soda giants dog and we arranged a meeting with an ngo that has been interested in the Cocacola Group for a long time. Is a specialist in ocean pollution and shes going to explain how the multinational twists words and statistics. Are best cook at the lab see project just sort of the visit of the maids and the mess they are in. Supply of a country. Back to the 11th renewable plastic is essentially plastic made from a plant base but it 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. So 60. Thats set for the plastic or sickly. And olives day when youve owned at a special project a fundamental difference and we are clearly very far from the target from the n. G. s point of view cocacola is recycling targets are 1st and foremost a marketing ploy to ensure that the consumer keeps buying their plastic bottles. On tests. As a whole lot of us see clash lessers volatile 3 pts. Later of course. Sabbats protests were so long that sanju wouldve called. Tele. 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. Other talent. Justifies nice. 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 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 glass 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 the old bottle that the company has forever 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 have to reach him nice to be its nearly thank you very much for the look on our precentor thank you for here our knots. In this gentleman is called us and down a he what of the american environmentalists agency from many is hes also the best 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 from this big green translucent all risk less. Obvious to us. Dani 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 ems. What they wanted to know is if you take into account in all other and environmental impacts on nature what is the best system the engineer works for over a year comparing the environmentalists impact of glass bottles to that of any medium 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 makes 315 trips before it is discard is the ecological container proposed also. Thanks to this report the Cocacola Company knows full well at the start of the seventys that returnable gloss pollutes significantly less than 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 to have airing the public see. 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 way plastic. I watch them slowly introducing the plastic bottles easy go. For someone to i even remember clearly one time going to going home and saying to bridget my wife as they go into the plaster bottle told you they would and they are not growing its just a 1st step center nice that ted eco plastic bottles playlist and one glass bottle. With this at that for its new plastic bottle released in 1975 cocacola various aston danis report once and for all. Its life is 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 deposit system want is the reason behind this because ultimately it 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. My name is 2nd. On those who say thats exactly what i dont see its a. Little bit over there you know if. When you know were going to get it out. Because of. The movie deal there will be pizza and i used. To make it a day easier for those who teach school on drug use to people. Who. Who who goes to clubs because who clubs do really hes trying to fit a music that. I love to jazz because he makes me. I love he does because he makes me unhappy plainville to listen. And when you go to church we had nothing. To do beyond that as in the us its backed up by. Not so darned. Good. That i dont. Today there are good tennis and bad deadens the bad news in yemen the United States deems to be a threat the good those one in syria the cia and the us military were engaged in covert actions really throughout the world. Where they were assassinating populist leaders they were backing up right away military windows funding an army just was theres no posts anymore because theres always a small income for a really good. Profit. Are. We. The Syrian Army Pushes deeper into the province forcing extremist fighters from dozens of villages. The french government introduces a new. Trucks in its battle to reduce carbon emissions. And Research Shows u. K. Arms exports to the Saudi Led Coalition in yemen have spiked in the last 5 years. Our broadcasting live from our studios in moscow this is our chief International Im sean thomas certainly glad to have you with us all right now the Syrian Military is fighting to reclaim the countrys last a rebel