The two tobacco companies Altria and Philip Morris International combined made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, both Danone and Nestlé each produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.

54 points

Time for the beneficiary’s of these companies to start footing the bill for cleaning up their garbage.

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31 points

Nah, best we can do is privatize the profits and let the public pay the costs.

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14 points

But the economy! 😭

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-9 points

That is a good idea. I wouldn’t want to loose the convenience of buying coke in a plastic bottle. So instead, make these firms legally commit to investing in clean up programs so at least some of the litter will be recovered.

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18 points

Coke in glass or metal is indistinguishable.

Let’s just use the leverage of it being so few companies to force them to do what’s right.

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13 points

Glass is just as convenient

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3 points

It doesn’t work like that. The biggest danger of plastic waste is that it can release microplastics into our waterways and food supply. You can clean up tossed bottles, but you can’t clean microplastics.

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29 points

This is for large plastics. Big pieces of trash.

Microplastics are almost entirely just tire dust.

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4 points

Last I heard was about 75%

It’s a lot but a pretty far cry from “almost entirely“.

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1 point

And yoga pants. Don’t forget yoga pants. Though if I get rare cancer, I hope it’s from girls in yoga pants.

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1 point

When they grind up large plastic it turns into small plastic

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7 points
*

And yet even still the overwhelming majority of that “small plastic” is just… tire dust. That’s still the bulk of the material.

That’s the vast scale of automobile pollution. Another piece of how horrific auto-centric society is for the entire planet.

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23 points

Survey finds that 60 firms own half of the worlds companies.

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22 points
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11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.

More than ten percent from a single company…

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21 points

When I buy a bottle of Coca-Cola I am not actually paying much for the sugary water. I’m paying for the convenience of having it in a bottle.

In my mind, this convenience fee ought to be enough to pay for the convenience of also discarding said bottle. Otherwise, they really sold me the inconvenience of having to deal with the bottle that they use to distribute the sugary water.

So, get on with it, Coca-Cola, clean up your shit. I already paid you.

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11 points
*

This is really close to truth. So many of those products producing trash are useless (bottled water) or even actively harmful (soda, cigarettes). You don’t actually need to pay Coca-Cola at all. You just need a reusable bottle and a water fountain or tap.

Coca-Cola and Phillip Morris will not suddenly start being helpful.

In that sense: encourage your municipality, employers, etc. to set up public water fountains and no-smoking zones. (And if you really want sweet drinks, buy syrups.)

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10 points
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I believe this is true, Circle K gas station near me still has soda fountain drinks for 80-110 cents. The cans and bottles start at 2.50 or more.

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8 points

I’m old enough that it was normal and not a hassle to bring your glass bottles to buy Coke and wherever fizzy drinks. But at one point that option disappeared.

Also it helped that a family dinner would consume like a liter, and we didn’t have it everyday.

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