“Planet Action”. This is the pompous
name that Sprite/Coca-Cola
Argentina has chosen for its
environmental protection project. Young
enthusiasts will comb the beach equipped
with special gloves, garbage bags, and
fluorescent identifying t-shirts. No doubt
the marketing team has picked a lively
jingle that will catch the attention of
beachgoers, while cheering the group of
trash collectors on, encouraging them to
work diligently and merrily in this noble
task of saving the planet, picking up the
rubbish produced by capitalist society.
Another alternative, not promoted by the
advertising agency, would be in the
company’s own facilities. The teenagers
march out in their search for trash,
shouting out the campaign’s slogan for all
to hear. Something similar to what happens
in FEMSA, Mexico, where
workers sing loud war chants, urging to
PRODUCE more and more .
Paola Aldaz Bierre,
Flavor manager at Coca-Cola, declared
that Sprite wants to contribute to
raise awareness on the issue of
environmental protection, “from an honest
and genuine position that will allow us to
tell it like it is.” Amidst all these
gimmicks, one can only ask what will happen
when these youths, sweating buckets under
the relentless sun -incidentally, there’s
nothing anywhere about providing them with
sunblock-, realize that a great deal of the
garbage they carry off in their plastic bags
are precisely plastic soft drink bottles,
and most probably Sprite bottles, as
this is the second favorite soda, after
Coca-Cola, among teenagers between the
ages of 16 and 19. Will they be interviewed?
Will they be able to tell it like it is,
as Ms. Aldaz Bierre announces? Will
they be able to tell, for example, that
Sprite invited them to collect the
garbage that Sprite produces? You
have to “tell it like it is,” and the
fact is that the source of a large volume of
the waste generated, with the ensuing risks
for the environment, is the high levels of
production of disposable bottles.
In Mexico City, in 2004, PET demand for the
manufacture of bottles stood at 55.800
tons a year. Millions of plastic
containers, which the soft drink industry
will later discard daily, severely
affecting, among other things, the sewage
systems of cities around the world that
Coca-Cola wants to save.
Casting away
your sins by blaming others
Escobar y Vega,
of the Green Environmentalist Party of
Mexico (PVEM), makes an interesting
analysis: “Since the mid 1990s, the leading
soft drink and mineral water bottling
companies have been trading in glass bottles
for plastic PET bottles, adding more
containers to the deluge of plastic that
floods Mexico’s rivers, lakes, seas, streets
and dumps. The trend is to continue
replacing non-disposable PET bottles with
disposable ones, and to do the same with
glass bottles, for obvious market reasons:
plastic containers are cheaper to
manufacture than glass ones.”
Substituting PET for glass has brought
significant benefits to soft drink
companies. For one thing, as we said, PET is
much cheaper than glass, and costs are
reduced even more if the bottles are
disposable, because companies don’t have to
bother to collect the bottles, wash them,
and reuse or recycle them. You have to “tell
it like it is,” Ms. Aldaz Bierre:
it’s easier to pass on the responsibility of
what to do with the bottles to consumers and
city halls, while the companies bombard
public opinion with their social
responsibility policies.
Profiting with the can at hand
With capitalism at its globalizing phase,
workers are increasingly becoming a
dispensable input. Transnational
corporations have specialized in job
disposal, both technically and
ideologically. The system “prefers a dollar
saved in costs to an extra dollar earned.”
Coca-Cola Enterprises,
the world’s largest beverage bottler and
distributor, announced this week that it was
cutting 3.500 employees off its payroll.
These job cuts were made public in the form
of a regular press release directed to the
stock market. Wall Street was swift to
react: the day after the press release, the
company’s stock was up 1.90 percent, rising
to 20.92 dollars.
While Coca-Cola United States
gets rid of thousands of employees, managing
with the can at hand, in Argentina,
the transnational corporation organizes a
psychedelic pilgrimage with images of social
and environmental responsibility. You have
to tell it like it is: pure garbage, nothing
more!
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Gerardo Iglesias
©
Rel-UITA
February 15, 2007 |
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