Solving the Problems We Create
Jeff Bezos said recently that we (meaning Amazon? meaning the world because he is the emperor of everyone and can and should speak on our behalf?) can pursue an agenda of both sustainability and an economy of dynamism and growth. We can have it both ways. And I suppose we believe him because he is worth $130 B and runs a company worth an order of magnitude more than that times two. Can we though? Amazon ostensibly is the backbone of modern commerce — the rails of exchange for non-durable consumer goods — a category that ultimately makes up about half of global GDP (albeit, Amazon’s share of that global total in sales volume isn’t quite 1%). Amazon generated $280.5 B in net sales in 2019 — up 20% from 2018. This is solid growth for a company at this scale. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders assumes the pursuit of growth, and lots of it, and as a company, they are delivering. In the case of Amazon, this growth requires consumers to live up to their name and continue to consume at seemingly faster velocities than at any time in history. The DtoC economy that is driven, and arguably was invented, by Amazon, also assumes an extra layer of unit packaging required to deliver our consumption safely to our doorstep. A package inside a box for each little thing we buy. Corrugate, bubble wrap, plastic film — all incremental to the packaging waste from “conventional” old-school commerce. Definitely not a trivial amount. It assumes a delivery vehicle to close the gap on the last mile, and the last 50 feet, burning fuel along the way. So again, how do we pursue both an agenda of sustainability with dynamism and growth? It’s an honest question that I am trying to figure out.
Likewise, the Coca-Cola Company is pursuing an initiative called a World Without Waste — a good faith effort to recycle one for one every piece of primary packaging they produce by 2030, to make all packaging 100% recyclable by 2025, and make sure that all bottles and cans are made of 50% recycled material by 2030. These targets are a good start, and in a static world, would perhaps be enough. But in a world of growth, and certainly within a profit-maximizing public corporate environment, any goal tied to a growing number creates a situation of a moving goal post. Every year, EVERY YEAR, eight million metric tons of plastic enters the oceans. According to the latest audit of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, about 20% of that is beverage. Coke is 40% of the global non-alcoholic beverage market, and, since alcohol rarely comes in a plastic bottle (but who knows, I don’t drink), let’s just assume then that Coke is 40% of that 20% of the Pacific Patch, or 8%. Extrapolating that simple math would indicate that Coke product comprises 640,000 metric tons of the plastic being dumped in the oceans every year (primarily PET). That is two Empire State Buildings (by weight) of plastic per year. 267 species of marine wildlife are adversely affected by ocean plastics (so let’s say then that KO is responsible for adversely affecting 21.4 of those species) in ways ranging from hormone disruption, malnutrition, suffocation, interfering with reproductive systems, etc. And microplastics ingested by these marine animals, of course, makes it onto our plates, and those monomers and polymers have the same physiological impacts on us. So goals on the primary packaging are good, and I don’t want to unduly criticize good faith efforts, but they are perhaps not first principles enough. We may have to fundamentally call into question and rethink the efficient, safe, yet environmentally deleterious materials we have tabbed to distribute our consumer packaged goods. PET, to its credit, recycles really well, BUT, we don’t recycle it perfectly, and probably never will. We are staying on the same curve by wanting to only recycle better.
In my estimation, a full lifecycle ecological assessment is pretty damning. I don’t know Jeff, maybe a world of sustainable consumption doesn’t look like what you want it to.
