Part 4 (2/2)

If it seems a stretch to brand soft drinks as the next tobacco, then bottled water seems an even more unlikely villain. Here's a product with no harmful tar or sugar, no addictive nicotine or caffeine. Yet CAI was affronted by the way in which the bottled water corporations were taking over local water supplies, often paying next to nothing for the privilege. In Nestle's case, the company was tapping underground aquifers around the United States, as citizens from Maine to California and Michigan to Texas complained about dried-up streams and dropping water levels around their plants. But at least Nestle could legitimately call its ”spring water” a unique beverage. c.o.ke and Pepsi were bottling munic.i.p.al tap water, pa.s.sing ostensibly clean water through additional purification processes, and then selling it for a huge markup. Meanwhile, c.o.ke's huge advertising campaign touting Dasani's ”purity” further undermined public confidence in tap water, they argued, leading to more bottled water sales and less investment in public infrastructure.

By the time CAI began sounding the alarm in 2004, consumers were spending some $9 billion annually on bottled water in the United States, consuming an average of twenty-three gallons of the stuff per person (those numbers have since risen to $11 billion and twenty-nine gallons). Each year, sales increased by almost 10 percent-reminiscent of Goizueta-era c.o.ke before the backlash over obesity began. In fact, as soft drinks started to decline in sales for the first time, c.o.ke increasingly promoted water as a healthy alternative, spending tens of millions of dollars to rebrand itself as a ”hydration” company, and replacing c.o.ke signs with Dasani signs on the sides of vending machines. All of those marketing messages sunk in; a Gallup poll at the time found three in four Americans drank bottled water, and one in five drank only only bottled water. bottled water.

Despite its popularity, however, a growing body of evidence has shown bottled water to be no purer or safer than tap-and in some ways, potentially less less safe. That's because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on contaminants and mandates daily testing and mandatory notification of problems. Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which by its own admission has set a ”low priority” for regulating bottled water plants. Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems. safe. That's because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on contaminants and mandates daily testing and mandatory notification of problems. Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which by its own admission has set a ”low priority” for regulating bottled water plants. Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems.

And sure enough, the benzene scare over Perrier and the bromate controversy in Britain are just the beginning of the problems with bottled water quality over the years. A cla.s.sic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical a.s.sociation found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, a.r.s.enic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers ”can't trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were ”popular” brands.) That spotty safety record of bottled water doesn't let tap off the hook. The same a.n.a.lysts at EWG found that tap water from forty-two states met federal standards for contaminants but still included a range of toxic goodies, including gasoline additives and endocrine disruptors, for which the government had not set limits. In early 2008, the a.s.sociated Press reported traces of pharmaceutical drugs and hormones in the water in twenty-four American cities, affecting 41 million people. True, the amounts were virtually microscopic-present in parts per billion or parts per trillion-but doctors cautioned even those small amounts can have effects with repeated exposure. ”After learning about all the things that can go wrong with tap water, I don't know what to think, or drink,” sighs Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania Bottlemania, a 2008 expose of the bottled water industry.

Despite all of the conflicting studies and alarms, the truth is that in the United States, both tap water and bottled water are generally safe to drink. And that might be the most d.a.m.ning charge of all against bottled water, given the price difference between the two. On average, convenience-sized bottled water costs just over $2 per gallon, while tap water costs just one-or two-tenths of a cent per gallon-a difference of one thousand times. With statistics like these, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before people began thinking what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years-that ”Evian is just 'naive' spelled backward.”

Even as some newspaper stories questioning bottled water began to appear, however, the activists from CAI realized that none of the charges against bottled water would mean anything if they couldn't address the issue of taste. The idea of the Tap Water Challenge grew out of a late-night brainstorming session in CAI's Boston office in 2005, as the activists groped for a way to take the issue head-on. Not knowing what they'd find, they pitted the tap water in their office against bottles of Dasani and other brands; they were genuinely surprised to find that they couldn't tell the difference.

In the early spring of 2006, CAI rolled out Tap Water Challenges in seven cities-including Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, and San Francisco-adding others every few weeks over the next six months. Everywhere they went, people were amazed to find they couldn't distinguish between bottled and tap. Just as decades of advertising had convinced people they liked c.o.ke Cla.s.sic more than Pepsi or New c.o.ke, it seemed the millions spent on branding bottled water had made people think it tasted fresher and purer than tap. And just like the Pepsi Challenge a generation earlier, the ready-made conflict of pitting two beverages against each other was irresistible to the media. Newspapers began running on-the-scene reports of die-hard Dasani or Aquafina drinkers chagrined to find they'd mistaken their favorites for Newark or Philadelphia tap water.

CAI's Gigi Kellett, the national director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, admits the group first chose cities they already knew had good water-including Boston and San Francisco, which pipe in water from reservoirs so pristine they don't have to filter it. Soon, however, they realized they could hold them almost anywhere-even places such as South Florida that had a reputation for poor-tasting tap water. Oftentimes, the most skeptical taste-testers hadn't tasted the water in years. When they held challenges in Miami-which sources its water from an underground aquifer before submitting it to a high-quality filtration and treatment system-they got the same results as anywhere else.

As awareness of the Tap Water Challenges spread, however, the activists found the issue that resonated most with consumers had less to do with the quality of the water, much less privatization and control of water resources. Instead, they were most concerned with the bottles themselves. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore had just released the doc.u.mentary An Inconvenient Truth An Inconvenient Truth, warning of the apocalyptic consequences of climate change and spurring consumers to measure their personal carbon footprints and carry canvas bags to the grocery store instead of wasting excess plastic. Likewise, there seemed something especially galling about wasting all of that plastic for a product that could just as easily be had from the tap. According to a 2009 report by the nonprofit Pacific Inst.i.tute, it takes the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic for all bottled water consumed in the United States in a year-enough to power 1 million cars. Add in the cost of production and transport, and that number increases to between 34 and 58 million barrels. (And worldwide production takes three times that.) Then there is disposal. Nationwide, the average container recycling rate was 33 percent in 2009, down from a high of more than 50 percent in 1992. Much of that decrease was due to the introduction of bottled water, which has doubled over the past decade to nearly 33 billion liters sold by 2008-nearly all of it in single-serving PET containers. Since bottled water containers have been recycled at notoriously low rates of less than 20 percent, the Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.-based Container Recycling Inst.i.tute concludes that these containers have brought the overall recycling rate down. Add it all up, CRI says, and that translates to some 3 billion pounds of plastic bottles in the waste stream each year. Bottled water companies, of course, dispute the notion that bottled water containers are more to blame than other products for plastic waste. According to Joe Doss, president of the International Bottled Water a.s.sociation (IBWA), PET bottles represent only a third of 1 percent (.0033) of all trash. ”If you can get your head around that, it's very clear that these efforts to target bottled water are misguided at best and totally ineffective in dealing with the problem at worst,” he says. In some ways, he has a point-what makes bottled water any worse than soda, juice, or beer, which also use plenty of water in their production and are nearly as likely to end up in the trash? And in an increasingly on-the-go society, isn't it better for people to grab a bottle of water at the convenience store rather than a sugary soda?

That's long been the line of the bottled water folks, who argue that bottled water isn't competing against tap water so much as against other beverage choices, like soda. ”Every day in newspapers and on TV you see stories about increasing obesity and diabetes,” says Doss. ”These actions against bottled water will have no good consequences if they discourage people from drinking a healthy beverage.”

Without tras.h.i.+ng soda, c.o.ke makes virtually the same argument. ”Consumers are making a choice of bottled water versus another beverage,” said c.o.ke's director of water stewards.h.i.+p, Greg Koch, in 2007. ”Do I want a Coca-Cola? Do I want a coffee? Or is it happy hour? There's a time and a place for bottled water, as there is for milk and juice and beer.” In a sense, it's the same argument that the company used for years to support drinking soda-consumer choice-updated for a new beverage.

As for recycling, Doss says the IBWA has lent support to curbside recycling initiatives-adding that two-thirds of bottled water is consumed at home, at work, or in offices, places where curbside recycling is readily available. Those also happen to be places where tap water is readily available, however, contradicting the argument that bottled water is necessary as an alternative beverage ”on the go.” When that discrepancy is pointed out, Doss, too, falls back on the mantra of ”choice”: ”It is a choice, it's always a choice, they should have that choice, bottled water consumers are choosing to drink both and there is nothing wrong with that.”

While that argument might float to some degree, it's hard to say c.o.ke and its fellow companies aren't competing against tap water when they are churning out advertis.e.m.e.nts full of mountain streams and rivers emphasizing how pure and tasty their water is-not how easy it is to grab at the 7-Eleven on the way to the gym. As bottled water has caught on, it has taken over in more and more places that tap water used to be available-and even replaced tap water entirely in many homes and offices. Just as pouring-rights contracts led to a proliferation of soft drinks in the 1990s, now water fountains have disappeared at schools, airports, and munic.i.p.al buildings, which all have contracts with bottled water producers instead.

The most dramatic consequence of that s.h.i.+ft occurred at the inauguration of the University of Central Florida's new stadium on a sweltering day in 2007. The stadium had been built without any water fountains, a fact discovered by fans when concession stands ran out of the Dasani they'd been selling at $3 a bottle. Some sixty people ended up suffering from heat exhaustion as a result of dehydration; eighteen were sent to the hospital. Initially, school officials apologized by handing out a free bottle of Dasani to each ticket holder at the next game; after widespread fan outrage, however, they eventually agreed to install fifty water fountains, an amenity that had somehow previously escaped their minds.

Incidents such as these, coupled with the Tap Water Challenges, turned awareness of bottled water's environmental consequences into a full-fledged backlash-driven by the unlikely champions of those most responsible for tap water's production: U.S. mayors. Sick of being criticized about the water quality of their cities, mayors began canceling city contracts with bottled water companies and even began reinstalling water fountains in their city halls. Taking the issue further, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took a resolution to the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June 2007 that would commit all member cities to phase out bottled water at munic.i.p.al buildings and events. Joining him to cosponsor the resolution were two mayors from more conservative political territory: Salt Lake City's Rocky Anderson and Minneapolis's R.T. Rybak. When the American Beverage a.s.sociation, led by c.o.ke, showed up to lobby aggressively against its adoption, arguing that it was only the first step in banning bottled water citywide-a direct affront to capitalism-their efforts backfired. While the mayors stopped short of pa.s.sing a resolution encouraging members to ban bottled water, they did approve a resolution to study the issue and its effects on munic.i.p.al trash systems. More surprisingly, the study actually occurred, and a year later, resulted in pa.s.sage of the earlier, tougher call for a ban. as these, coupled with the Tap Water Challenges, turned awareness of bottled water's environmental consequences into a full-fledged backlash-driven by the unlikely champions of those most responsible for tap water's production: U.S. mayors. Sick of being criticized about the water quality of their cities, mayors began canceling city contracts with bottled water companies and even began reinstalling water fountains in their city halls. Taking the issue further, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took a resolution to the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June 2007 that would commit all member cities to phase out bottled water at munic.i.p.al buildings and events. Joining him to cosponsor the resolution were two mayors from more conservative political territory: Salt Lake City's Rocky Anderson and Minneapolis's R.T. Rybak. When the American Beverage a.s.sociation, led by c.o.ke, showed up to lobby aggressively against its adoption, arguing that it was only the first step in banning bottled water citywide-a direct affront to capitalism-their efforts backfired. While the mayors stopped short of pa.s.sing a resolution encouraging members to ban bottled water, they did approve a resolution to study the issue and its effects on munic.i.p.al trash systems. More surprisingly, the study actually occurred, and a year later, resulted in pa.s.sage of the earlier, tougher call for a ban.

By then, more than sixty cities has already joined the backlash, with Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Austin, and Providence all either canceling bottled water contracts or instructing city departments not to buy bottled water. At the same time, restaurants moved to take bottled water off their menus, starting with chef Alice Waters, the G.o.dmother of ”California cuisine,” who nixed bottled water from her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse in March 2007. Soon after, Food Network favorite Mario Batali followed suit at his empire of restaurants, including Manhattan's swish Del Posto.

If the summer of 2003 was the season that childhood obesity exploded into public view, the summer of 2007 was the season the United States woke up to bottled water. Even The Economist The Economist has called the success of bottled water ”one of capitalism's greatest mysteries” in an online editorial in July 2007, conjuring the patent medicine era by calling it the new ”snake oil.” Kellett remembers the exact day when she realized CAI had won-July 15, 2007. While organizing a day to call in to Pepsi's corporate headquarters, she was taken aback by a strange playback message saying executives were meeting to determine how to respond to activist concerns-a response CAI hadn't heard in decades of organizing. has called the success of bottled water ”one of capitalism's greatest mysteries” in an online editorial in July 2007, conjuring the patent medicine era by calling it the new ”snake oil.” Kellett remembers the exact day when she realized CAI had won-July 15, 2007. While organizing a day to call in to Pepsi's corporate headquarters, she was taken aback by a strange playback message saying executives were meeting to determine how to respond to activist concerns-a response CAI hadn't heard in decades of organizing.

Finally at the end of the day, Pepsi declared that, from then on, it would label Aquafina with the words ”public water source,” identifying its origins from munic.i.p.al sources. If it had hoped through the action to stave off further criticism, it failed. Within two days, the activists were doing round-the-clock interviews with every major television and news organization to talk about how not only Pepsi, but also c.o.ke, sourced its water from the tap.

Within just a few years, bottled water had gone from trendy to gauche. In the fall of 2007, CAI began circulating a ”Think Outside the Bottle” pledge, asking people to drink public water over bottled water whenever possible. Within just a few weeks, it signed on several thousand people, celebrities among them, including actor Martin Sheen. In late 2007, actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Lucy Liu supported a project to charge $1 for tap water in New York City restaurants to raise money for UNICEF's clean water efforts abroad. They raised $100,000. By that fall, Nestle had joined Pepsi in revealing the source of its water on its labels-and went even further by including detailed water quality information on its website for all brands by 2009.

Alone among the Big Three bottled water producers, c.o.ke held out. ”The FDA's definition of purified water does not require [revealing] the source,” argued c.o.ke spokesman Ray Crockett. ”We believe consumers know what they're buying.” Unfortunately, his words turned out to be too true. After a decade of near double digit growth, bottled water suddenly plummeted in 2008-with sales volume dropping 2 percent over the previous year. Dasani fared even worse, with sales dropping 4 percent, despite slas.h.i.+ng its prices by 40 percent in the previous three years.

Part of that was due to the major recession that hit that fall; as consumers tightened their belts, they cut down on luxuries such as a $1.50 bottle of water at the convenience store to fill their own bottles at the tap. But they might never have made the choice to do that had they not already been a.s.sured they'd be safe doing so. As the recession hit, CAI moved from city hall to the state house, encouraging governors to cut state bottled water contracts to save scarce state resources. By then, Coca-Cola had already planned its response, and true to form, it was more in the vein of changing its image than changing its reality. Over the last hundred-some years, c.o.ke had gone from a health tonic to an all-American drink to a symbol of worldwide harmony. Now it would work to undergo its biggest branding change in decades to become an environmental steward.

Lined up outside the bottling plant in Needham are eight tractor trailers, their polished sides gleaming red in the sun. Another, pulled around in front of several rows of foldable chairs, is hung with a big sign on the side: ”Do You Know This Hybrid Electric Truck Helps Reduce Emissions in Our City?” The press conference today has been called to announce the addition of fifteen of these new hybrid trucks to the Ma.s.sachusetts fleet, part of Coca-Cola Enterprises' ”Commitment 2020,” a new initiative to become an environmentally sustainable company within the next decade. outside the bottling plant in Needham are eight tractor trailers, their polished sides gleaming red in the sun. Another, pulled around in front of several rows of foldable chairs, is hung with a big sign on the side: ”Do You Know This Hybrid Electric Truck Helps Reduce Emissions in Our City?” The press conference today has been called to announce the addition of fifteen of these new hybrid trucks to the Ma.s.sachusetts fleet, part of Coca-Cola Enterprises' ”Commitment 2020,” a new initiative to become an environmentally sustainable company within the next decade.

”We've set pretty aggressive goals,” says Fred Roselli, CCE's press officer, standing in the parking lot before the press conference. Wearing big black sungla.s.ses and a black suit despite the eighty-degree heat, he looks like a Mormon Bible salesman, and has the enthusiasm to match. ”We're reducing absolute numbers of carbon 15 percent from our 2007 levels,” he patters. ”We've installed energy efficient lighting, we're putting in water-saving technology, we've started a whole new company to do recycling.” The tractor trailers, he says, are part of the largest fleet of hybrid trucks in North America-some 237 by the end of 2009, each one spewing 30 percent fewer emissions into the air.

All of these environmental initiatives are ”part of CRS,” says North American president for Coca-Cola Enterprises Steve Cahillane, as he takes the podium. On cue, employees circulate through the crowd, handing out pins in the shape of a green c.o.ke bottle reading ”Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability.” ”CRS is all about making a difference wherever our business touches the world,” Cahillane continues. ”We not only work here, we also live here, so we are doing everything we can to create sustainable communities.”

The concept of socially responsible business practices isn't new-though usually it's called CSR, for ”corporate social responsibility” (perhaps inverting the letters is a way for c.o.ke to claim owners.h.i.+p of the concept). In fact, c.o.ke's environmental initiatives follow a script that dates back to the 1950s. It's then that corporations, having survived the Progressive Era and FDR's New Deal, began to proactively affirm the power of businesses to benefit society. ”Business managers can more effectively contribute to the solution of many of the complex social problems of our time,” wrote Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey-which would become Exxon-in 1951. ”There is no higher duty of professional management.” The concept emerged as a sort of n.o.blesse oblige of corporations, who responded by spreading a set amount of their profits to social causes in their communities.

Of course, there were limits to what a corporation could do-since legally its obligations were to increase profit for its shareholders, not spread its wealth to solve the world's problems. Henry Ford had found that out in 1916, when his Ford Motor Company was sued for using profits to give discounts to customers instead of dividends to shareholders. The judge in the case sided against him, ruling that ”a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of its stockholders.” It's that principle that has caused Joel Bakan to argue that corporations are essentially ”pathological” ent.i.ties-maximizing profit at the expense of any other good-whether workers' rights, environmental improvements, or even its own customers' pocketbooks. ”The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others,” he writes.

That's not to say that corporations can't do good, however, so long as their efforts align with their profit motive. The second wave of corporate social responsibility began in the 1970s, when, faced with challenges from consumer advocates like Ralph Nader (and CSPI's Michael Jacobson), corporations realized that investing in social causes could serve as a kind of insurance against criticism. It was in this era that c.o.ke's Paul Austin pursued his ”halo effect” with hydroponic shrimp farms, desalinization plants, and soybean beverages that he argued could help earn goodwill in the developing world at the same time they helped make c.o.ke's vision of global harmony a reality.

Surprisingly, the practice of CSR was further entrenched by the Reagan administration, which encouraged voluntary corporate giving as a way to fill the void left from cutbacks in social programs. Even while Goizueta sloughed off the do-gooding subsidiaries acquired by his predecessor Austin, c.o.ke established the Coca-Cola Foundation in 1984 in an effort to ”enhance our ability to meet the growing needs of the communities we serve, and to provide the company with an established, forward-looking program of charitable giving.” Historically, of course, c.o.ke had long given to charity, dating back to Asa Candler's first gifts to Emory University. But while Candler resented the obligation to give, and Robert Woodruff earned the nickname ”Mr. Anonymous” for the lengths he went to avoid credit for his charitable giving in Atlanta, Goizueta ensured that the new Coca-Cola Foundation would go out of its way to gain publicity for its actions. ”It's not that we plan to be boastful now, but we plan to step out in our name and give at a level that we can be proud of,” said its first president at the time.

While the Coca-Cola Foundation was ostensibly independent from the corporation itself, it focused its efforts in areas closely aligned with the goals of the company, concentrating particularly in the area of c.o.ke's most important market-children. Neatly getting around c.o.ke's policies about advertising to children, c.o.ke inst.i.tuted a $50 million giving program to elementary and middle schools throughout the 1990s, and followed it up with a $60 million gift to Boys & Girls Clubs that came with an exclusive beverage agreement with the organization in 1997.

In fact, Goizueta was one of the pioneers of ”strategic philanthropy,” the newest trend in CSR that emerged in the 1990s. Instead of spreading money around broadly to a number of causes in an effort to be seen as a good corporate citizen, corporations increasingly began tying their nonprofit foundations to the image they were trying to achieve for their brand-from Exxon investing heavily in conservation issues after the Valdez oil spill in 1994, to AT&T pouring money into kids' art and education programs as it expanded into cable and the Internet. Some companies even competed to sign exclusive contracts for particular causes, as yogurt maker Dreyer's discovered when it asked to support the largest breast cancer foundation, only to discover that Yoplait had already signed on.

The ”social branding” was working. One survey found that, all things being equal, 84 percent of people would switch brands to a company that supported a good cause. While some financial purists such as Milton Friedman declared CSR ”evil” for perverting the free market, most financial a.n.a.lysts saw it for what it was: ”a cool appraisal of various costs,” in the words of one Financial Times Financial Times columnist, since ”companies less exposed to social, environmental, and ethical risks are more highly valued by the market.” columnist, since ”companies less exposed to social, environmental, and ethical risks are more highly valued by the market.”

No one could argue, after all, that CSR was fundamentally changing the character of business-in an era when the United States saw some of the worst examples of corporate wrongdoing in history in WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and other companies that cooked their books to shovel record profits into the pockets of executives and investors at the expense of their own customers and employees. As the real threat of global warming emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, companies rushed to tout their environmental consciousness. The most notorious example is British Petroleum, which rebranded itself BP and vowed to move ”Beyond Petroleum” to alternative energy. After years of positive publicity, however, alternative fuels have never amounted to more than 5 percent of company spending; in 2009, a new CEO announced he'd be scaling back on even that commitment in an effort to improve profitability. The following year, of course, BP was responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history when one of its deep-sea oil rigs exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, discharging thousands of barrels of oil a day. After the incident, it was revealed, BP had lobbied against a simple safety measure that could have prevented the accident.

Even when the environmental branding isn't such obvious ”greenwas.h.i.+ng,” it obscures one simple fact: Most of the initiatives companies have taken to increase efficiency and drive down their carbon footprints are also just good business. That's certainly the case with c.o.ke, whose efforts to reduce emissions, water use, and electricity, after all, also mean reducing costs. Asked to name anything the company is doing that is actually costing it money, Roselli hesitates. ”Well, the hybrid trucks cost more,” he says. ”It will take three years to recoup the money we spend on those.” Asked if any of the projects will cost the company money in the long run in the long run, he responds, ”Well, the bottom line is the bottom line,” he says. ”I think big corporations want to be able to do that, but we're trying to figure out which projects to prioritize.”

The danger of CSR initiatives is that they have become such a branding tool that they make it seem like the opposite is true-that companies are somehow investing in causes out of a motive of self-sacrifice, rather than partnering partnering with causes for mutual benefit. And as branding has become the primary reason for CSR, the appearance of doing something can overshadow the benefits of doing it. That's certainly the case with c.o.ke's biggest environmental advertising initiative, touting its recycling efforts at the same time that the bottled water backlash has been drawing attention to all of that wasted plastic in Dasani bottles. with causes for mutual benefit. And as branding has become the primary reason for CSR, the appearance of doing something can overshadow the benefits of doing it. That's certainly the case with c.o.ke's biggest environmental advertising initiative, touting its recycling efforts at the same time that the bottled water backlash has been drawing attention to all of that wasted plastic in Dasani bottles.

Just as the criticism against bottled water was going mainstream, in late 2007, c.o.ke announced a new partners.h.i.+p between the Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises to create Coca-Cola Recycling, with the stated goal of eventually recycling 100 percent of its PET plastic bottles. The cornerstone of the effort was a new $50 million facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that it announced would be the world's largest ”bottle-to-bottle” recycling plant. By 2010, the company boasted, the plant would have a capacity of 100 million pounds per year, making it the most ambitious effort ever by a company to recover and recycle all of its own packaging materials. against bottled water was going mainstream, in late 2007, c.o.ke announced a new partners.h.i.+p between the Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises to create Coca-Cola Recycling, with the stated goal of eventually recycling 100 percent of its PET plastic bottles. The cornerstone of the effort was a new $50 million facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that it announced would be the world's largest ”bottle-to-bottle” recycling plant. By 2010, the company boasted, the plant would have a capacity of 100 million pounds per year, making it the most ambitious effort ever by a company to recover and recycle all of its own packaging materials.

To celebrate its effort, the company created an ”eco-fas.h.i.+on” line of clothing made from recycled plastic; and, of course, it launched a new ad campaign, premiering during American Idol American Idol in January 2009. Called ”Give It Back,” it featured people tossing c.o.ke bottles into recycling bins, only to see them pop out anew from slots of c.o.ke machines. To drive home the message, c.o.ke began working with parks, zoos, and sports stadiums to prominently display red recycling bins in the shape of c.o.ke's hourgla.s.s bottle. in January 2009. Called ”Give It Back,” it featured people tossing c.o.ke bottles into recycling bins, only to see them pop out anew from slots of c.o.ke machines. To drive home the message, c.o.ke began working wi

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