Coca-Cola is one of the most popular brands in the world. Its global reach, which includes more than 200 countries, was demonstrated in a 2020 advertisement in which families drank Coca-Cola during meals in Orlando, Florida, Shanghai, London, Mexico and Mumbai, India.
Operating at this scale creates a huge carbon footprint. The company uses more than 200,000 vehicles a day to deliver its products and operates hundreds of bottling and syrup manufacturing plants worldwide.
But Coca-Cola's biggest contribution to climate change is its coolness.
Operating refrigerators consumes a lot of electricity and some of the refrigerants in these systems are greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. About two-thirds of the climate impact of refrigeration comes from electricity costs, with the rest coming from chillers. In 2020, cooling accounted for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
History suggests that the most effective way to reduce Coca-Cola's refrigeration emissions is to consider whether the company needs refrigeration equipment that operates 24 hours a day in convenience stores on city corners and on the streets of the world. He is hostile to a company obsessed with keeping Coca-Cola always "reluctant," as one Coca-Cola president put it.
As I show in my new book Rural Capitalism: How South American Corporations Reshaped our Economy and Planet, large corporations like Coca-Cola made significant profits by making their products available around the world. In doing so, they created a thriving form of long-distance trade that is a major driver of our planet's current environmental crisis.
Required: Standard coolant
Refrigerants first became an environmental issue because of concerns about ozone depletion, not climate change. Until the 1980s, the main refrigerants used in refrigerators were chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. These compounds, discovered by a General Motors chemist in the 1920s, were odorless, non-flammable and apparently non-toxic, all properties that made them useful for industry. In the following decades, CFCs became the main refrigerant used for refrigeration.
Then, in the 1970s, researchers at the University of California discovered that CFCs could destroy stratospheric ozone, a gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the sun's ultraviolet rays. Countries eventually decided to ban the use of CFCs through the 1987 Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental agreements of all time.
Chemical companies such as DuPont have developed new chlorine-free refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which do not deplete the ozone layer. Like CFCs, HFCs attracted industry because they were odorless, nonflammable, and posed no serious threat to human health.
But HFCs had one major drawback: They are powerful greenhouse gases that trap heat in Earth's atmosphere, warming the planet's surface. The global warming effect of some HFCs is 1,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
HFC principle
Companies like Coca-Cola were aware of the impact of HFCs on global warming when they began adopting this new refrigerant in the 1990s. Coca-Cola engineer Brian Jacobs, who worked on the transition, told me in an interview that initially cooling experts recommended another promising route, Europe instead.
Greenpeace supporters in Germany worked closely with refrigeration engineers to develop what became known as GreenFridge refrigeration equipment: machines that used hydrocarbons including isobutane and propane as coolants. These refrigerants, which had significantly less global warming impact than HFCs, fulfilled their promise to protect the ozone layer and climate.
Jacobs told me that Coca-Cola was "quite dismissive" because his team feared that these incinerator-filled refrigerated units would explode, especially in rural areas where technical support was lacking. Coca-Cola switched to HFCs instead.
In response, Greenpeace launched a major campaign during the 2000 Sydney Olympics to expose how Coca-Cola's HFC plants were warming the planet. Doug Daft, an Australian who was Coke's managing director at the time, urged the company to phase out HFC refrigeration from its systems over the next few years.
always near
Since 2000, Coca-Cola has been a world leader in the development of HFC-free refrigeration. The company first invested heavily in a new type of refrigerator that used carbon dioxide as the main refrigerant. However, the company quickly realized that hydrocarbon-based coolants posed less of a safety risk than first feared and began introducing these units as well.
Coca-Cola convinced other companies to phase out HFCs. In partnership with Unilever, Pepsi, Red Bull and other leading companies, the company Refrigerants, Naturally! launched, an organization dedicated to helping leading food and beverage companies transition to HFC-free refrigeration. In 2010, Coke CEO Mukhtar Kent convinced nearly 400 consumer goods companies to phase out HFCs from their refrigeration systems.
In 2016, Coke reported that 61% of all new refrigeration equipment purchased was HFC-free. Four years later, this number reached 83%.
However, in 2022, more than 10% of new refrigerated coke plants contained HFCs, and refrigeration was the main source of greenhouse gas emissions. Part of the problem is that all these units run on electricity, much of which comes from burning fossil fuels. Considering that Coca-Cola sells about 2.2 billion drinks a day, keeping Coke fresh still has a huge carbon footprint. The same is true of Coca-Cola's competitors.
In an interview with former Coca-Cola Sustainability Director Jeff Seabright, I asked him if the company had thought more broadly about the need to keep Coca-Cola refrigerated at all times. Seabright's answer was a resounding "no" and the company's mantra was still to make Coca-Cola available for immediate consumption at the point of sale.
Despite the resources Coca-Cola has invested in replacing coolers, its coolers are still warming our planet. In my opinion, maybe it's time for Coca-Cola to consider whether they need all these machines in the first place, and for consumers to consider whether their "get it now" expectations are worth the environmental cost. .
This article is excerpted from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to the exchange of ideas among expert scientists. Discuss real expert information from an independent, non-profit organization. Try our free newsletter.
Author: Bert Elmore, Ohio State University .
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Bart Elmore received development funding from the University of North Carolina Press in support of the book discussed in this article. Based on his previous work, including his 2015 book, The Coca-Cola Citizen: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, he was awarded the Dan David Prize in 2022. He was a Fellow of the New America Foundation in 2017-2018.
