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Coca-Cola, one of the world’s largest contributors to the ongoing plastic pollution problem, announced to its shareholders this week that it has a plan to curb the impending costs of tariffs proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump: more plastic.
The announcement came from the beverage company’s CEO James Quincey on Tuesday, which is counter to previous plans Coca-Cola had made to reduce its use of plastic for product packaging and reach sustainability initiatives for 2030, 2035, and beyond. President Trump’s order to impose a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum entering the country, however, means swapping plastic packaging with more sustainable, recyclable materials would undoubtedly impact the bottom line.
The Atlanta-based company had been relying more heavily on aluminum cans in large part because they are easier to recycle and therefore lighten the company’s environmental footprint.
“If one package suffers some increase in input costs, we continue to have other packaging offerings that will allow us to compete in the affordability space,” Quincey said. “For example, if aluminum cans become more expensive, we can put more emphasis on PET [plastic] bottles.”
“It’s a cost. It will have to be managed,” he added. “It would be better not to have it relative to the U.S. business, but we are going to manage our way through.”
As it is, just under 50 percent of Coca-Cola’s products sold in the U.S. came in plastic bottles in 2023. So an uptick in plastic use by a major distributor of bottled beverages is going to result in significant plastic pollution (an increase our oceans don’t need). That’s not a great sign for the environment, but it’s an obvious solution for the bottom line — one which Quincey seemed to contradict in the same call with shareholders, later downplaying the impact of it all.
“I think we’re in danger of exaggerating the impact of the 25 percent increase in the aluminum price relative to the total system,” Quincey said on the company’s earnings call. “It’s not insignificant, but it’s not going to radically change a multibillion-dollar U.S. business, and packaging is only a small component of the total cost structure.”
Regardless, more plastic containers obviously creates more waste, which at this point, is not good.
