Coke Faces New Charges in India, Including ‘Greenwashing'
By Aaron Glantz
June 7, 2007, OneWorld.net
http://us.oneworld.net/section/us/current
LOS ANGELES - The Coca-Cola company has been charged with
illegally seizing lands communally owned by small farmers and
indiscriminately dumping sludge and other industrial hazardous
waste onto the surrounding community. This comes as the
multinational beverage giant announced a new effort Tuesday to
protect rivers on four continents.
The San Francisco-based India Resource Center, an
environmental health non-profit, further charged Coca-Cola
with releasing untreated wastewater into surrounding
agricultural fields and a canal that feeds into the Ganges
River in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
The charges are based on the results of a fact-finding mission
led by the group to a Coca-Cola bottling plant in the region.
'Access to potable water is a fundamental human right,' said
Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center.
'The Coca-Cola company must acknowledge that it is part of the
problem of water unsustainability in India and elsewhere,' he
added.
This is not the first time environmental groups have
criticized Coke's operations in India.
In 2003, in response to a growing campaign against Coca-Cola,
the Central Pollution Control Board of India surveyed eight
Coca-Cola bottling plants in the country and tested the sludge
at all these facilities. The Board found all the sludge at all
the Coca-Cola bottling plants it surveyed contained high
levels of toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and chromium.
At the time, it ordered the Coca-Cola company to treat its
sludge as industrial hazardous waste.
Those toxic problems, coupled with allegations Coke has been
complicit in the murders of union organizers at bottling
plants in the South American nation of Colombia, have been
increasingly troublesome to the Atlanta-based company.
In the last six months, 25 universities from the United
States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, including the
University of Michigan, the University of Guelph in Canada,
and the University of Manchester in England, have all taken
actions to remove Coca-Cola from their campuses.
On May 29, the president of Smith College in Massachusetts,
Carol T. Christ, barred Coke from participating in the
school's upcoming soft drink bidding process. Coca-Cola's
seven-year contract with Smith College expires on August 31.
'In light of Coca-Cola's business practices in Colombia and
India, Smith will preclude Coca-Cola from the list of approved
bidders when we enter the contract renewal process later this
summer,' Christ wrote in a letter.
Coke vehemently denies the charges.
'The allegations that led to this decision are based on
Internet rumor and myth, and have been proven false time and
again,' Coke spokesperson Diana Garza Ciarlante told New
Dehli-based Indo-Asian News Service.
'While our business relationship with Smith College is
important, the integrity and reputation of our company is more
important,' she said.
On Tuesday, the soft drink giant announced its own
environmental plan, pledging to spend $20 million to conserve
seven of the world's most critical river basins.
Right now, it takes 2.5 liters of water to make and bottle 1
liter of Coke, and 250 liters to grow the sugar cane in the
mix.
'We are focusing on water because this is where Coca-Cola can
have a real and positive impact,' Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO
E. Neville Isdell told a gathering of environmental advocates.
The pledge was announced at the annual meeting of the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Beijing. Over the life of a multiyear
partnership with WWF, the company pledged to focus on
'measurably conserving' China's Yangtze, Southeast Asia's
Mekong, the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo of the southwest United
States and Mexico, the rivers and streams of the southeastern
United States, the water basins of the Mesoamerican Caribbean
Reef, the East Africa basin of Lake Malawi, and Europe's
Danube River.
'We call this ‘greenwashing," said Srivastava of the India
Resource Center. 'An attempt by the Coca-Cola company to
manufacture a green image of itself that it clearly is not, as
their practice in India shows.'
Coke's announcement did not mention any measures to conserve
water basins in India, a decision that did not surprise
Srivastava.
'The Coca-Cola company and WWF did not dare to include India
in this initiative (because) the public in India is
increasingly becoming aware of the Coca-Cola company's
disastrous relationship with water, and would have to see it
for what it's worth - a drop in the bucket,' he told OneWorld.
The deal also rubs U.S. critics of Coke the wrong way.
'In itself it's a good thing, but we see it as largely a
tactic to divert attention from other areas,' Patti Lynn of
the watchdog group Corporate Accountability told OneWorld.
'Coke is just trying to get some public relations points.
They're using this as a diversionary tactic,' she added.
Lynn and other U.S.-based consumer advocates are angry because
of the foray that Coca-Cola has made into the bottled water
market.
From the 1970s to 2000, Corporate Accountability says, the
annual volume of bottled water purchased and sold in the
United States has increased by over 7,000 percent. Yet the
bottled water industry operates with little or no regulation.
'Tap water is better regulated, and often safer,' said Lynn,
adding that bottled water costs 3,000 percent more.
Lynn pointed to a 1999 study by the National Resources Defense
Council on bottled water sold in the United States, which
found traces of arsenic, chloroform, and other impurities;
chemicals that would be illegal if found in tap water.
Coca-Cola spent $1.7 billion on advertising last year. In
North America, Coca-Cola distributes three bottled water
brands: Dasani, Dannon, and Evian.
According to the Washington, DC-based Earth Policy Institute,
consumers spend about $100 billion on bottled water each year.
By comparison, experts estimate that just $15 billion per
year, above and beyond what is already spent, could bring
reliable and lasting access to safe drinking water to half a
billion people worldwide - fully half of those who lack it.
'The way that Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle have marketed bottled
water has had the effect of undermining people's confidence in
tap water and contributed to a broad societal shift,' Lynn
said. 'Instead of buying bottled water, we need to be
investing in our shared, public water systems.'
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