L.A. County Sues Pepsi and Coca-Cola Over Their Role in the Plastic Pollution Crisis (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0175389975
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/0354205/la-county-sues-pepsi-and-coca-cola-over-their-role-in-the-plastic-pollution-crisis
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/l-county-sues-pepsi-coca-202106790.html
> Los Angeles County has filed suit against the world's largest beverage companies — Coca-Cola and Pepsi — claiming the soda and drink makers lied to the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling and, as a result, left county residents and ecosystems choking in discarded plastic... The Los Angeles County suit alleges — in a vein similar to that of [California attorney general] [2]Bonta's suit against Exxon Mobil — that the global beverage companies misrepresented the environmental impact of their plastic bottles, "despite knowing that plastics cannot be readily disposed of without associated environmental impacts."
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> "Coke and Pepsi need to stop the deception and take responsibility for the plastic pollution problems" their products are causing, said Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chair Lindsey P. Horvath... Currently, just 9% of the world's plastics are recycled. The rest ends up being incinerated, sent to landfills, or discarded on the landscape, where they are often flushed into rivers or out to sea. At the same time, there is growing concern about the health and environmental consequences of microplastics — the bits of degraded plastic that slough off as the product ages, or is used, or washed. The tiny particles have been detected in every ecosystem on the planet that has been surveyed, as well as nearly every living organism examined... According to the county's statement, the two companies have consistently ranked as the world's "top plastic polluters...."
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> The beverage maker lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison on behalf of the people of the state of California... "The goal of this lawsuit is to stop the unfair and illegal conduct, to address the marketing practices that deceive consumers, and to force these businesses to change their practices to reduce the plastic pollution problem in the County and in California," Harrison said in a statement. "My office is committed to protecting the public from deceptive business practices and holding these companies accountable for their role in the plastic pollution crisis."
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/l-county-sues-pepsi-coca-202106790.html
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/09/23/2336240/california-sues-exxonmobil-for-alleged-decades-of-deception-around-plastic-recycling
Wish then luck (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish LA Luck in the suite. I still believe plastic bottles with Coke is a health risk to people. I remember when they started replacing glass, my friends were young and tried to avoid plastic, but that became impossible.
Also I remember some commercials stating plastic was easier to recycle. Plus around this time bottle deposits ended, putting the recycle burden on the general population instead of the company, causing massive pollution.
Now the "new" bottle deposit is so low that hardly anyone will return their used bottles. Never mind sometimes when you try to return, you get "we do not sell that here" and you fight with the large food chain. Time these bottle deposits be fixed to make people want to return the bottles and force stores to take all bottles. And make the returns nation wide instead of by State.
Re: (Score:2)
I find the taste different from a plastic bottle. Glass is better, with the cans being a middle ground.
Go back to glass bottles, and instead of melting and recycling them - clean them thoroughly and refill like they used to.
Did LA County accept... (Score:1, Insightful)
...tax revenue from these sales? Are they still doing it? If so they have no moral ground to stand on with this hypocrisy. To demand largesse and denounce it at the same time is beyond logic.
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Taxation is not "demanding largess". This is not "hypocrisy" by any common meaning of the word. If they did something to encourage plastic production, for instance by giving these companies a tax abatement to locate a plastics factory in their county ... then THAT would be hypocrisy.
Re:Wish then luck (Score:5, Insightful)
clean them thoroughly and refill like they used to
This is actually more costly both from monetary and environmental standpoint. Those poisons needed to "clean them thoroughly" are not your standard dishwasher detergent.
Aluminium cans FTW.
Re: (Score:1)
That's not the main problem. Unless you've kept a photograph of the freshly cleaned and sterilised bottles, which would have been prohibitively expensive in the early 1980's, you will be sued by, and lose to, every criminal who put a piece of broken glass into his Coke bottle. This is ignoring those idiots who would add dirt or bugs to their Coke bottles, not knowing that dirt and bugs would have absorbed trace amounts of the clenaing solutions, allowing the bottlers to prove that they were added post pro
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"Market Ground Beef" is beef that has been hit with radiation. Surely a similar process can be used with other materials.
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> Aluminium cans FTW.
Aluminum cans are lined with plastic or epoxy which is never, ever recycled.
Reusable containers FTW.
Re:Wish then luck (Score:5, Informative)
In Ontario, Canada all beer bottles are standardized and returned to the breweries for refilling. I've been in the plant and even worked on the machinery in one brewery. It takes in full pallets of cases of 24 bottles from the retail stores, de-palletizes it automatically, removes the bottles from the cases automatically, sends the bottle caps and cardboard off for recycling, then sends the bottles down a conveyor where they're thoroughly washed, inspected for any chips, cracks, or foreign debris, and then they head over to the filling line. Studies show that on average each bottle gets about 10 uses, and the ones that fail inspection are crushed and the glass is recycled anyway. So we can totally do it. The deposit is still 10 cents per bottle, the same as it was when I was a kid.
Re: (Score:2)
In the states, this is how soda bottles used to be until around the mid-1980s -- deposit return bottles to supermarkets and retailers.
Retailers didn't like it because they don't want to deal with it. Those bottles come in dirty and sticky. They're heavy and hard to deal with.
I still prefer those deposit return glass bottles and think we need to go back to them.
Re: (Score:2)
> This is actually more costly both from monetary and environmental standpoint.
It is not, and this is actually something done in quite a few countries around the world. Those "poisons" (everything is a poison given the concentration) are no different than the sterilizing agents already used for prepping glasses in beer production for example.
Re: Wish then luck (Score:2)
Sometimes referred to a Mexican Cokes in Los Angeles. They taste different and in my opinion better.
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I've seen them all over the place. Real sugar makes a difference.
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Nope, only the 6oz glass bottles from Mexico is made with cane sugar the 8oz bottles made in the USA or other countries are using HFCS
Re: Wish then luck (Score:2)
I work in a grocery store and I'm looking right at 12oz glass bottle from Mexico with came sugar.
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As mentioned elsewhere, you can often find Mexican Coke. It meets both of those.
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Cans are equivalent to plastic bottles because the cans are lined with plastic. Any difference you might taste is a result of the placebo effect. Glass is superior and does genuinely taste different/better.
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> Go back to glass bottles
Plastic bottles don't break into glass allowing your kids to cut themselves. I remember reading an article a number of years ago about how Coke was trying to get a high percentage of the plastic into their bottles. They failed miserably because there wasn't enough plastic available to do it. If you're interested, google the article as I am not your research assistant.
Glass? Or plastic? [Re:Wish then luck] (Score:3)
> Go back to glass bottles, and instead of melting and recycling them - clean them thoroughly and refill like they used to.
I like this in principle, but in the real world, glass bottles are an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles, and hence you lose in transportation what you gain in recycling.
I'll also note that glass takes more energy to make (about 1500C melting temperature), so unless you do recycle it multiple times, plastic has an advantage. And glass is breakable.
But plastic also has problems. It's not an obvious answer which is better.
[1]https://earth.org/glass-bottle... [earth.org]
[2]https://www.bbc.com/futur [bbc.com]
[1] https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment
Re: (Score:3)
> I like this in principle, but in the real world, glass bottles are an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles, and hence you lose in transportation what you gain in recycling.
Not so much. The trucks that deliver the soda go home empty and especially in the case of Coca-Cola they are often owned by the bottler. They could transport empty glass bottles back to the bottling plant instead and the cost of transporting the bottles would be small.
> I'll also note that glass takes more energy to make (about 1500C melting temperature), so unless you do recycle it multiple times, plastic has an advantage. And glass is breakable.
The more times you recycle the bottles, the bigger the advantage is for plastic, because it takes a lot less energy to recycle PET beverage containers into PET beverage containers than it does to recycle glass into glass, which takes almost as
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>>
> Now the "new" bottle deposit is so low that hardly anyone will return their used bottles. Never mind sometimes when you try to return, you get "we do not sell that here" and you fight with the large food chain. Time these bottle deposits be fixed to make people want to return the bottles and force stores to take all bottles. And make the returns nation wide instead of by State.
Interestingly, companies initially fought deposit rules until the realized the collected x in deposits but only payed back part of what they collected. Years ago, I lived in a state with no deposit next to one with one. Since I was on teh border, it was easy to cut your costs by the deposit costs with a quick trip.
Re:Wish then luck (Score:5, Insightful)
> I remember some commercials stating plastic was easier to recycle.
The kind of plastic they use for coca-cola bottles is easy to recycle. In fact that's the kind of plastic most commonly recycled back into the same kind of containers that were made from it before. Crystal Geyser owns their own PET recycling plant and you can visible see they are using post-consumer waste because the recycled product has a little darkness to it which is visible in the thick parts of the bottles. Interestingly, Coca-Cola is also using post-consumer PET in their bottles and you can see the same thing with their products.
> Now the "new" bottle deposit is so low that hardly anyone will return their used bottles.
Yes, that's a big fail.
> Never mind sometimes when you try to return, you get "we do not sell that here" and you fight with the large food chain.
Yes, every outlet which sells anything in recyclable packaging should be required by law to take it back and put it into a recycling stream. Don't want to have to contribute to the solution, don't contribute to the problem.
Re:Wish then luck (Score:4, Interesting)
Honeslty I hope the judge tells them to f**K right off.
LA would be suing them over climate change for carbon emitted shipping all that heavy glassware around had they not switched, or injuries to small animals due to broken glass or some other stupid reason.
This is a cash grab.
Plastic bottles did not become the norm because of anything nefarious, they became the norm because the vast majority of consumers WANTED THEM. Beer, Wine, and liquor are largely sold in glass even now; because for the most part consumers seem to want it that way. Attempts to move away from glass bottles and/or aluminum cans generally failed in the market place. Despite all the anti-plastic sentiments, even that is starting to change with respect to single serve containers and lower shelf entries especially.
If LA county wants to sue someone they should their residents who bought and irresponsibly disposed so many of those plastic containers and continue to do so each and every day. That would be appalling too but slightly less unjust. The FDA approves plastic for food containers! They EPA has decades to act, long before Chevron was repealed and did nothing. If you want to start holding people responsible for historic harms related to plastic pollution the standard should have to be some much higher than mere negligence.
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> Plastic bottles did not become the norm because of anything nefarious, they became the norm because the vast majority of consumers WANTED THEM.
I think you don't understand the issue. People "wanted" plastic bottles because they were lied to about the effectiveness of plastic recycling.
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No they wanted plastic bottles because they were lighter and easier to carry around. They could capped and left to roll around in your car half empty or returned to your backpack, etc. You can give them to children without fear of them being broken and causing injuries. They always wanted to cheaper, and to not have to bother returning empty bottles etc.
Plastic offered them all that and more!
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People still have to weigh the ethical consequences in their minds when choosing between options. The white-coated lies from the plastics industry allowed consumers to much more easily disregard the consequences of their purchases.
This same principle is why some, but not all, meat-eaters turn vegetarian or vegan. The consequences of their actions cause them to alter their decisions.
Local Problem? Local Solution. (Score:4, Insightful)
Local problems require local solutions.
Sounds like LA county needs to fix their own damn garbage problem by taxing the solution locally. 300% tax on all soft drinks in plastic bottles should be a good start.
Otherwise, LA county might find out how a couple of global mega-corps have NO problem with stopping all product from flowing into a single county. Probably cheaper than the legal battle. Let the sugar junkies in LA county squirm until voting day.
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The bottle is a hazard to health.
The contents of the bottle (sugar or artificial sweeteners ) are also a hazard to health.
Just stick to water (from the tap... filtered if possible) instead of flavored water.
Oblig. (Score:2)
Crying Indian!
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it was. It was a new added cost for every existing bottling plant. They had to replace all of their bottle handling machinery with plastic handling machinery, and it wasn't cheap.
Recycling (Score:2)
> For years, consumers have purchased products in single-use plastic bottles and packaging believing, based on PepsiCo's and Coca-Cola's marketing, that their "disposable" products can be recycled. They have dutifully rinsed and sorted plastic products into designated recycling bins and carted them to curbs or trash rooms believing they are doing their part to make sure that the plastic they buy does not end up as waste
I'm willing to believe that Coke and Pepsi are wrong, but California municipalities also misled a lot of people with their recycling programs, in some cases punishing people who didn't properly sort their garbage.
It was completely reasonable to believe that if you put a plastic bottle into the recycling bin, it would be recycled, and that wasn't Pepsi's fault.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the manufacturer's responsibility to recycle. It's their responsibility to make their product reasonably easy TO recycle.
After that, it's just down to the consumer to take responsibility for their convenience of packaging, and to recycle and sort what they throw away. Part of the reduced price a consumer pays for a conveniently packaged product is due to the tiny little inconvenience of them having to properly dispose of the packaging. (or product) Consumers that take advantage of the lower cost and then don't recycle properly are basically cheating the system.
Recycling and sorting your trash is a social responsibility. People that don't do it need to grow up and act responsibly. And I'm 100% fine with them getting hit with a ticket or something for not doing their part. Things like plastics are a convenience that comes with a cost on the back end, and anyone not willing to contribute to that pay-back is just being a parasite to the rest of the community and taking advantage of the system at a cost to the rest of the community.
I was talking with someone awhile ago about recycling, noticing she has a few food cans in the garbage instead of the recycling bin. When asked why that was, she said that a few of the cans are just "too much work to clean out" (becacuse the food is sticky and requires a little clean-out) so she just throws them away. True, recycling does happen more when its more convenient, but it needs to happen ALL THE TIME, not just when it's the easiest option.
And if the state is having problems with their recycling program, that's not the company or the consumer's fault. Everyone needs to be doing their part for this to work.
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> And if the state is having problems with their recycling program, that's not the company or the consumer's fault. Everyone needs to be doing their part for this to work.
No. Absolutely not. It is not up to consumers to figure out what kind of plastics can be recycled and what can't. This is a stupid layover from early recycling where there was no municipal option and those who were gung ho about recycling did all this themselves. Today, municipalities should be handling sorting garbage in two bins: one for paper/paper-like products, the other for everything else. They can then train a small number of people at a small cost relative to the overall budget to know exactly what
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This post reads more like the knee-jerk response from slashdot troll than a genuine take on corporate responsibility in plastic recycling. The lawsuit isn't about consumer blame or cash grabs. You would know that if you bothered to read it, but obviously that is not the case, here. It is about stopping companies from making deceptive claims about recyclability that have little basis in reality. The issue is not consumer laziness or convenience -- it's that companies have long misled the public about the e
Should be suing city council. (Score:2)
So, here's the disclaimer: I work in the recycling industry. The suit targets the wrong people.
It's their responsibility to make their product reasonably easy TO recycle.
PET (from which Coke and Pepsi bottles are made) is one of the most sought after polymers for recycling, and is one of the easiest to recycle. It is already being recycled in Alabama, of all places. And there is already a PET recycling facility in [1]Riverside, California [resource-recycling.com]. Who knows why Riverside - which is just an hour east of LA
[1] https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2021/05/26/plastics-giants-snatch-up-carbonlite-plants-via-auction/
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The text you quoted addresses reusability, not recyclability. Ar least when I was younger, there was a slogan: "reduce, reuse, recycle" that implied they were usually separate solutions.
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> The text you quoted addresses reusability, not recyclability.
It has the word "recycle" multiple times, but doesn't say reusable anywhere. I don't think many people thought plastic bottles were reusable, except for occasional art projects and such.
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The text talks about what consumers did and believed with respect to recycling, but the only related descriptions it applied to these bottles were "single-use" and "disposable".
Recycling, Is Fair Play. (Score:2)
> ..California municipalities also misled a lot of people with their recycling programs, in some cases punishing people who didn't properly sort their garbage. It was completely reasonable to believe that if you put a plastic bottle into the recycling bin, it would be recycled, and that wasn't Pepsi's fault.
When a taxpayer citizen ends up being punished in some way for not complying with recycling, perhaps it’s completely reasonable for those citizens to initiate their own legal action.
Misleading, can lead to lawsuits. A country just taught its citizens that.
Pepsi and Coke should sue the people of LA (Score:3, Funny)
For throwing all their bottles on the ground instead of recycling them.
LA should ban all plastics (Score:4, Interesting)
If they were serious and not pulling a cash grab they would lead the way and ban all plastics from the city.
Soft drink bottles are made from PET (Score:2)
So soft drink bottles are made from PET, which is the most recyclable plastic (the #1 inside the recycling symbol). In the US the recycling rate for PET is around 30%. Again that's the highest of any kind of plastic. You can improve this with better collection infrastructure, but there's still a limit because the quality of recycled PET isn't as good as virgin material. Glass bottles are far more recyclable, pretty close to 100%, and glass isn't harmful to the environment, but glass costs more for trans
Too many types of plastic [Re:Soft drink bottl...] (Score:2)
In some sense the real problem here is that we have too many types of plastics, each of which has a different requirement for how to recycle it (and what can be made from the recycled product), and hence recycling plastic is difficult because each piece of plastic, value maybe 1, has to be sorted and sent to the proper recycler.
Priorities, Priorities (Score:1, Interesting)
First, I love the State of California for all its natural beauty and climate. As a high-income earner, I left the state and never returned after moving to a tax-free state, which instantly gave me a 12% pay increase, but that's a different topic for another story that's been beaten to death. I would love to return. When people ask me where the one place on Earth I would choose to live: Southern California. Yet, I cannot return without losing a substantial amount of money. Second, FIX THE BIG ISSUES. Quit
Recycling is not sustainable. (Score:3)
Like it or not, plastics can usualy only be recycled 2-3 times before they become too damaged structurally to the point of unusable.
The same applies to other materials. Paper, for example can be recycled 5 to 7 times.
Only glass and (most) metals can be recycled an infinite number of times.
Sure, recycling plastic can help us make most of the materials, milk them as long as we can but, ultimately, it's just a delay tactic and eventually we'll need to either burn or bury that plastic somewhere.
This means that recycling plastic is not sustainable by design and we're just being fed a convoluted fairytale by those who benefit from manufacturing and selling plastic to protect their profits.
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So? After three cycles of being a bottle, let them become packaging.
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3 times recycled is still an overall and continuous reduction in the production of virgin plastic.
What about the stuff inside the bottle (Score:2)
Think that is the real harm.
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Only if you believe bad teeth, digestive issues, obesity, diabetes, and chronic dehydration are a problem.
You people complain about everything! (/s)
When will they sue tire companies? (Score:2)
> At the same time, there is growing concern about the health and environmental consequences of microplastics
50% of marine microplastics are from tire dust. When will they sue the tire and car companies?
Re: (Score:2)
Accurate. Some research says even more than 50%:
[1]https://www.sciencenews.org/ar... [sciencenews.org]
[2]https://www.plasticstoday.com/... [plasticstoday.com]
[3]https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]
But be careful of whataboutism. The fact that dust from tire abrasion is a problem doesn't mean that we should not deal with other problems.
[1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads-produce-harmful-microplastics
[2] https://www.plasticstoday.com/medical/tire-wear-a-major-source-of-microplastics-say-researchers
[3] https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
Re: (Score:2)
My other comments in this discussion make it clear that I am in favor of holding retailers responsible for the products they sell. It should be their responsibility as they are distributing the products to consumers, the manufacturers are not doing that. (There may be some grey area where the corporations own the vending machine distributors or similar — you can allegedly get a Coca-Cola vending machine installed at no cost if you have a high traffic area for example.)
But tire dust is clearly the sing
9% recycled eventually means nearly 0% (Score:2)
Even if you take that 9% of plastic gets recycled, As it gets used again, Likely 9% of the recycled products then get recycled. Over time it all ends up in the environment. Plastic just doesn't seem like a good long term (20, 50, 100 years) material.
Then just ban their sale. (Score:2)
If you sue but don't stop sale of such a bad product in the county, then this is all just for show and money.
day one (Score:2)
If this lawsuit is not thrown out on day one, it can only indicate a corrupt judge.
ok L.A. county (Score:2)
Love how politicians lack the forsight when its convenient to know that trash will accumulate on one time use plastics. They have no problem collecting the sales tax or the bottle deposit fee but make no plans to allocate that money for effective disposal.
Copy of the complaint (Score:5, Informative)
[1]Here is a copy of the complaint [lacounty.gov].
[1] https://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/lac/1169727_FiledPlasticsComplaintAgainstPepsiCoandCoke.pdf?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=