All film begins in hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in spite of the islands remote location it is also foreman victim to the epidemic of the 21st century plastic. Plastic pollution is littering beaches and endangering certain species of animals no matter how remote or out of reach. In this in a bar or a tree in the north of the occupied ago scientists study marine animals not plastic at least in theory. No idea what that. But its certainly plastic. Jessica perelman is a biologist accustomed to finding plastic in fish stomachs she has started a very unique connection. Casually often plastic bags and this was all coiled up in the stomach when i found it i had no idea what it wasnt i and all that it just. Or did you react when you find this installment i was shocked i started you know documenting it measuring it taking photos showing whoever else was around in the lab and we were kind of. We were just you know shocked to think that that these fish are are really ingesting this i mean. So how disbelief the scientist has found plastic in the non likely specimen known as the long fish. The young one was not expecting such a surprising discovery when she began this piece is. A 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 the long sit fish manages to swallow trivial plastic objects and i mean occasionally you might find a brand name such as this dishonor bottle label. What is this says is a label from a water bottle dishonored bottle clearly and found amongst the lancet. Is a red. Design design is a pretty well known. Bottled water company. You know finding finding i have all such as this and the sonics makes it that easy to determine where you know where it may have originated. This is always more to use than just what you see. Is just water in the bottle. In fact sunny is one of the worlds best selling water 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 1000 bottles a 2nd and this mass production is creating a devastating mass pollution. In january 2800 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 economy we need to create value for that theres absolutely doable for 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. 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 nicely thank you nice to meet you yeah really welcome to the average in here coming out to say were going to find out right now i doubt i have the drive was good that i wanted to run out yeah. But elmo is. Historian. Hes the author of a book about cocacola a best seller it retraces the multinationals anti environmentalists strategy particularly from the sixtys on woods when plastic began to revolutionize Consumer Society we began as a 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 the Organization CalledKeep America Beautiful. You hear Keep America Beautiful you think like wow this sounds like an organization started by a bunch of kind of bearded environmentalist or at least 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 there are the bad ones theyre the litterbug 30 throwing us 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 and huge that sense some people. Are bright. Natural beauty was one species. And this guy throws in his car he throws the packaging waist 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. Stop. 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 ad that 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 always backed by the company with the red and white logo. To understand 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 plan and then set their talents 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 fan of center. And listen closely some of his slip ups are extremely telling. I have to be fairly wealthy but i managed to install a nothing polyploid there yes yes i. Guess that it does here we do yeah it was exciting she alleges blagojevich is out thinking at least i think i. Was easy 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 i plaster and Plastic Packaging has a very useful function in society and we need to we need to remember that the problems are very feats of they are very very useful and they always lead to form a function as important as hiring again as individuals dispose of these packages so there cocacola for example one of those. Packaging rightly want to be ready to get it fiery safely i mean theres an air force i dont want to say and then fire 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 are. Going to some us are cutting you but if its. What you were using here i dont know i mean im asking you these are left in jersey question see my organization and scotland as my digital ok im fundamentally so tame committed to that will i volunteer my saying ok i want an optional destroys the government was fortunate as qualities and they hire experts and some companies and some companies are like. That i only get one more than a call center mcdonalds bring starbucks and most of real or some big brand names. We had to insist since the sixtys cocacola has been paving the way for other multinationals. But what if the soda giant really had decided to change a few months ago upon blue inching 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 the 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 that. Is absolutely doable theres a model there for the chinas and other parts of the world on how to create a. Value out of plastic and get it we used to. Have goes 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 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 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 recycled and renewable plastic are 2 very different things. To decrypt the soda giants jogen we arranged a meeting with an ngo that has been interested in the Cocacola Group for a long time. L. N. Bush is a specialist in ocean pollution and shes going to explain how the multinational twists words and statistics. Your best to the plastic that cocacola cause or no ball is made from plants such as corn starch of the visitors so they label it as plant pots or with a green bottle logo and a leaf. Supply but no matter the type of plastic the impact is the same whether its you do plastic back to you in a. 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 so its not 12. 4 percent recycled plastic not 7 veges no it doesnt mean that we have written proof from cocacola explaining to us in an email that in reality they only used 7 percent recycled plastic in spite of the fact that their goal for 2015 was 25 percent that is i dont call objective fundamentals a 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. That use enormous amounts of plastic see recycling as a solution that they can sell to the public vulnerable to reach. Later the problem is that recycling is not the whole solution in fact as long as i thought we have reached such a high level of complex plastic production that recycling cannot serve as the only solution its just not possible 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 amidst the massive information this document caught our attention its dated from 2016 and signed by the cocacola as a law being manager in brussels. The bullet points are all the measures that europe could adopt but which do not coincide with coca colas 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. 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 all well aware of this. And what is most ironic is that the returnable bottle is the actually 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 and 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 returnable bottle the company has 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 and im going to go with richard nice to me its early thank you very much for welcoming us to the center thank you thank you very much. And this gentleman is called us send down a call he was with the american environmentalists agency infinite many is hes also the 1st engineer in the world to investigate the ecological impact of cocacola bottles. That does a fair imitation that there are smaller. Typical quote battles about this from this big green translucent and all risk less. Obvious to us. Than donny is referring to the beginning of the seventys. 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 glass bottles to that of any 1000000 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 15. 00 trips before it is discard is the ecological container for parts all so. Thanks to this report the Cocacola Company knows full well at the start of the seventys that returnable glass pollutes significantly less than plastic. But the company would never publicly shed this information. We put this together for them and they didnt publish it you know why. They were not interested in it have everything the public seed of 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 a new life wait plastic to lease a bottle i watch them slowly introducing the plastic bottles serialised the 10 eco plastic box explain less than one glass bottle. With this advert for its new plastic bottle released in 1975 cocacola varies ason danis 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 would 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 their 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 as the reason behind this because ultimately it means 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 those ways. Lets recap in front of the cameras cocacola and c. E. O. Promise is a World Without waste thats our objective. But behind the scenes the American Company is doing everything in its power to less to any alternatives to plastic like the returnable bottle i think obviously. After months of negotiations with the american multinational we have a meeting at the headquarters of cocacola france for an interview. The Vice President of the Company Michael goldsman has travelled from the United States to on so how questions will he has worked with cocacola for 21 minutes hes in charge of Global Policy and environmental sustainability and hes a french speaking. Good apostle test of whats the percentage of recycled plastic that cocacola is currently putting in its bottles worldwide. Global scale we still have a lot of work to do and we are at 7 percent didnt reach your goal because dosing in 2008 is of the Cocacola Group had been aiming to put 25 percent recycled plastic into that bottles by 2015 its now 2018 and went very far. From that target the proportion of recycled plastic is just 7 percent how and why did that happen. Because it was very difficult and youre right we didnt reach our goals we are aware of that and we know theres a margin for improving our performance with our new strategy we believe that we can get there. I wanted to go we can agree youre very far away. I agree that we have a long way to go but we Just Launched this strategy in january that were now only in july. So cocacola has been working on a real policy or at least thats what youve been saying since january 28th seen on the m p cable that weve been involved in collection and recycling syste