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We have brought our concerns about toxic plastic packaging to the doorstep of one of the world’s biggest beverage companies. Today, we delivered our petition, “Tell Coca-Cola: Get rid of any toxic plastic bottles,” to The Coca-Cola Company headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Thousands of us took the time to implore the behemoth beverage brand to start to clean up its potentially toxic plastic packaging. Petition signatories hailed from all fifty states, Puerto Rico and American Samoa territories, and fourteen nations outside the US representing five continents. 

We urged The Coca-Cola Company to start addressing the possible toxic impacts of its overreliance on PET plastic packaging by sourcing bottles made with a safer alternative catalyst to rid packaging of the toxic chemicals antimony and cobalt. And the best news yet is that we know our efforts are having a real impact: confidential industry sources have said that some of the biggest beverage brands are now testing safer alternative catalysts! 

It’s taken a lot of initiative to raise our voices to such a powerful global brand, but we’re used to punching up when safeguarding environmental health. We started worrying about PET beverage bottles with our groundbreaking report Problem Plastic: How Polyester and PET Plastic Can be Unsafe, Unjust, and Unsustainable Materials. It compelled us to commission laboratory testing of popular brand beverage bottles and the beverages within them. What we found was frightening. Every beverage tested had some level of cancer-causing antimony, and forty percent had antimony levels that exceeded the level set by California for its Public Health Goal for drinking water. The testing also found cobalt in forty percent of the beverage samples. Six of the twenty samples were Coca-Cola brand products. Furthermore, follow-up testing we conducted detected antimony in all eight Coca-Cola brand beverage bottles tested.

Antimony is used as a catalyst in the production of PET plastic bottles, almost exclusively in the U.S., despite the knowledge that the compound can be cancer-causing. Chronic antimony exposure can increase the risk of cancer and liver disease and can increase risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. Exposure to antimony isn’t uniform either. Children may be exposed to antimony at more than twice the level of adults, and national data show that Latinx and Black communities may be disproportionately exposed to antimony from all sources, which can contribute to environmental racism. We researched the alternative catalysts available to the industry and were relieved to find several safer alternatives on the market. 

We’re optimistic that Coca-Cola and other big beverage companies are beginning to address the toxic effects of PET plastic bottles. However, as the companies expand and sell more products, the industry will need to do much more soon to reduce its widespread use of the material for packaging. Reuse systems need to be rapidly scaled up, and the industry must ensure the safest possible materials for those systems.