Mind-Boggling: Coca Cola Alone Produces 108 Billion Plastic Bottles a Year!

World’s PET plastic bottles production is about 500 bn a year.  Just Coca Cola alone produces 3 mn tonnes of plastic packaging a year, which translates into 200,000 bottles a minute. Ellen MacArthur Foundation has been working with the many Consumer Goods companies to disclose their plastic packaging consumption under its New Plastics Economy Commitment.  And companies like – Carrefour, Colgate Palmolive, MARS, Incorporated, Nestlé, SC Johnson, The Coca-Cola Company, and Unilever are now publicly sharing their annual plastic packaging volumes!

Coca Cola alone produces 3 mn tonnes of plastic packaging a year or 200,000 bottles a minute or 108 bn bottles a year! #plasticpollution Click To Tweet

The latest New Plastics Economy Global Commitment Report for Spring 2019 is now out.  You can download it from here – GC-Spring-Report.

The other companies also produce a lot of plastic packaging:

• Nestlé 1.7m tonnes
• Unilever 610,000 tonnes
• Danone 750,000 tonnes

The plastic packaging volume that Coca Cola shared for its annual figures, when translated into bottles, equals 108 bn a year.  Given that the global annual output is 500 bn bottles, one can see that Coca Cola alone produces a Fifth of the world’s plastic bottles.

A total of 150 companies who have signed up for the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment of Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is extremely commendable.

Make no mistake that this whole initiative will not reverse the damage that plastic bottles do to the environment, but just slow down what is a very gigantic mess.