Shareholders Ask Coke & Pepsi to Recycle

A group of socially concerned shareholders are pressing the Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. to live up to their 1990 announcement that they would use 25% post-consumer plastic in their bottles. Concerned amount the enormous environmental problems posed by millions of discarded plastic bottles, Walden Asset Management, As You Sow Foundation, Domini Social Investments, Trillium Asset Management, and lifelong Coke shareholder Lewis Regenstein are also asking the companies to support or institute programs to achieve a recycling rate of 80 percent for their beverage containers sold in the United States. The shareholders hold about $50 million worth of Coke shares. Working Assets has printed action alerts on 300,000 customer phone bills and numerous local governments have passed resolutions targeting Coke’s recycling waste. We decided to take this action because the plastic bottle waste problem is growing rapidly and overall beverage container recycling is dropping, said Conrad MacKerron, director of the Corporate Accountability Program at As You Sow. Investors have engaged Coca-Cola management in a substantive dialogue about these problems over the past year but the company has not agreed to commit publicly to recycling goals.Technology is not the problem. Coke uses 25 percent recycled plastic in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland […]

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