‘Woke’ Values Boomerang on Coca-Cola

The world’s largest beverage company has come down from the virtue-signaling sugar high it got by becoming “Woke Coke.”

Consumers and distributors have forced it to sound a partial retreat from its role as a combatant in such left-wing culture wars as the battle against election-integrity laws.

An expose of Coca-Cola’s “diversity” training revealed it was using highly provocative slide presentations focused on the race of its employees. The company’s high-profile support for “social justice” causes has people wondering why it lobbied to weaken a bill banning U.S. firms from relying on Chinese forced labor. Now, consumer groups are holding the soft-drink giant to account for slithering out of its promises to reduce its role as the planet’s top corporate polluter through its use of plastic bottles.

A new poll by Rasmussen Reports finds that by a 3–1 margin, respondents oppose major businesses taking a highly visible role in influencing politics. That may explain why Rasmussen found that 37 percent of Americans are less likely to buy Coca-Cola products in the wake of all these headlines.

Last month, Senator Rand Paul and former president Donald Trump called for a boycott of Coca-Cola products over its role in fighting a new Georgia election-integrity bill. Legal groups denounced Bradley Gayton, Coca-Cola’s general counsel and an architect of its “woke” strategy, for ordering at least 30 percent of the company’s outside legal billings go to “diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.”

The headaches proved to be too much. As Dan McLaughlin reported on NRO last month, Coca-Cola was conspicuously absent from a list of companies that had met to discuss sanctions against Georgia. “It’s time to find common ground,” the company said in a statement. “In the end, we all want the same thing — free and fair elections.” Within days, it was announced that Gayton was leaving his post to become a “strategic consultant.” His replacement said the firm was “taking a pause” on controversial diversity initiatives.

But controversy surrounding Coca-Cola isn’t going away. Liberals and conservatives are suddenly noticing that the same company that has been so sanctimonious in its “woke” warrior role hasn’t delivered on promises to clean up the glut of plastic waste it produces. It’s a problem. Putting plastics in landfills forever after they’ve been used a single time is wasteful and inefficient.

Current recycling laws haven’t proven very effective in reducing waste. But until 2018, the U.S. was allowed to export the problem to China, which since the 1990s had eagerly accepted some 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste. Then China suddenly banned plastic waste, damaging the business model of traditional recycling centers and forcing a rethink of the problem.

Coca-Cola has made splashy promises to change. It has pledged to use at least 50 percent of recycled materials in its packaging by 2030. Last year, it introduced 100-percent-recycled plastic bottles in the U.S. But the reality is that Coca-Cola has repeatedly and loudly made such promises and then quietly abandoned or watered them down without many people noticing. In 2009, they announced plans to source 25 percent of its plastic use from recycled materials by 2015. Six years after that deadline, Coca-Cola has hit only 10 percent.

That’s why Coca-Cola and other plastic producers are under new pressure from lawmakers. Last year, California passed a law requiring minimum recycled content for plastic beverage containers. New York and New Jersey are considering similar laws to deal with a glut of solid waste in their backyards

Minimum recycled content isn’t a final or perfect answer to the externalities of plastic pollution. But it is light-touch regulation that is friendly to the environment and supports the existing recycling industry. Ironically, it is Coca-Cola’s insistence on putting itself on a “social-justice” pedestal that may mean more states will be holding it to account for its plastic pollution.