Good morning! It’s peak summer, and almost all of us reading this right now would love nothing more than a chilled drink. And if you’re one of the world’s largest beverage majors, you’ll go the whole hog in perfecting your refrigerated supply chain. The problem? Refrigeration is a major source of emissions. Today’s story by The Conversation spotlights how the company’s marketing strategy of always having a chilled Coke within reach is a thorn in its own climate goals.

The Signal is now on Telegram! We've launched a group — The Signal Forum — where we share what we’re reading and listening through the day. Join us to be a part of the conversation!

If you enjoy reading us, why not give us a follow at @thesignaldotco on Twitter and Instagram.

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most widely recognized brands. Its global reach, spanning more than 200 countries, was the theme of a 2020 commercial that showed families drinking Coke with their meals in cities from Orlando, Florida, to Shanghai, London, Mexico City and Mumbai, India.

Operating on that scale creates a big carbon footprint. The company uses over 200,000 vehicles to distribute its products every day and runs hundreds of bottling plants and syrup factories across the globe.

But Coke’s single largest contribution to climate change comes from its refrigeration equipment.

Running refrigerators uses a lot of electricity, and some coolants in these systems are greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Almost two-thirds of the climate impact of refrigeration comes from electricity consumption, and refrigerants account for the rest. As of 2020, refrigeration produced nearly 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

History suggests that the most effective way to shrink Coca-Cola’s refrigeration emissions may be to question whether the company needs that cooling equipment running around the clock at convenience stores on street corners worldwide. That’s a heretical notion for a company obsessed with making sure Coca-Cola is always within “an arm’s reach of desire,” as one Coke president put it.

As I show in my new book, “Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet,” major companies like Coca-Cola have profited handsomely by making their products readily available worldwide. In doing so, they have created a fast-paced, long-distance form of commerce that is a major driver of our planet’s current ecological crisis.

Wanted: An ideal refrigerant

Refrigerants first became an environmental issue because of concerns about ozone loss, not climate change. Before the 1980s, the primary coolants used in refrigerators were chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Discovered in the 1920s by a chemist at General Motors, these compounds were odorless, nonflammable and seemingly nontoxic – all properties that made them useful to industry. In the following decades, CFCs became the chief refrigerant used to keep things cool.

Then, in the 1970s, researchers at the University of California found that CFCs could destroy stratospheric ozone, a gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Nations ultimately moved to ban use of CFCs through the 1987 Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental treaties on record.

Chemical companies such as DuPont led the way in promoting new chlorine-free refrigerants, called hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, that would not deplete the ozone layer. Like CFCs, HFCs appealed to industry because they were odorless, nonflammable and posed no serious threats to human health.

But HFCs had a big drawback: They were powerful greenhouse gases that trapped heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet’s surface. Some HFCs had warming impacts more than 1,000 times greater than carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas.

HFC politics

Companies like Coca-Cola knew about HFCs’ climate-warming effects when they began transitioning to this new refrigerant in the 1990s. Bryan Jacobs, a Coca-Cola engineer who worked on this transition, told me in an interview that early on, refrigeration technicians in Europe recommended another promising path instead.

Greenpeace advocates in Germany had worked closely with refrigeration engineers to develop what came to be known as Greenfreeze cooling equipment: machines that used hydrocarbons, including isobutane and propane, as refrigerants. These refrigerants, which had a global warming impact radically lower than HFCs, offered the prospect of protecting both the ozone layer and the climate.

Jacobs told me that Coca-Cola was “pretty dismissive,” largely because his team feared that these refrigeration units filled with flammable material might explode – especially in rural areas lacking technical support. Instead, Coca-Cola shifted to HFCs.

In response, Greenpeace launched a major campaign at the 2000 Sydney Olympics to expose how Coca-Cola’s HFC units were warming the planet. Doug Daft, an Australian who was Coke’s CEO at the time, committed the company to eliminating HFC refrigeration from its systems in the years ahead.

Always within arm’s reach

Since 2000, Coca-Cola has become a world leader in developing HFC-free refrigeration equipment. At first it invested heavily in a novel type of refrigerator that used carbon dioxide as the key refrigerant. Soon, however, the company recognized that hydrocarbon refrigerants posed fewer safety risks than they had initially feared, and began adopting these units as well.

Coca-Cola also convinced other companies to shift away from HFCs. Partnering with Unilever, Pepsi, Red Bull and other big firms, the company launched Refrigerants, Naturally!, an organization committed to transitioning major food and beverage companies toward HFC-free refrigeration. In 2010, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent persuaded some 400 consumer goods companies to commit to eliminating HFCs from their refrigeration systems.

By 2016, Coke reported that 61% of all new cooling equipment it purchased was HFC-free. Four years later, that figure reached 83%.

Still, as of 2022, more than 10% of Coke’s new refrigeration units contained HFCs, and refrigeration remained its single largest greenhouse gas emissions source. Part of the problem is that all of these units run on electricity, much of which is generated by burning fossil fuels. With Coca-Cola selling roughly 2.2 billion drinks every day, keeping Coke cold still has an enormous carbon footprint. The same is true for Coke’s competitors.

In an interview with Coca-Cola’s former chief sustainability officer, Jeff Seabright, I asked him whether the company had ever considered thinking more broadly about the necessity of cooling all those Cokes around the clock. Seabright’s response was an emphatic “No,” and that the company was still driven by the mantra of making Coke available for immediate consumption at the point of sale.

Despite the resources that Coca-Cola has invested in changing refrigerants, its cooling equipment is still warming our planet. As I see it, perhaps it’s time for Coke to question whether it needs all those machines in the first place – and for consumers to consider whether their have-it-now expectations are worth the environmental costs they impose.

Author: Bart Elmore, Professor of History, The Ohio State University

Bart Elmore received development funding from The University of North Carolina Press in support of the book discussed in this article. Based on his past work, including his 2015 book "Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism," he was a recipient of the Dan David Prize in 2022. He was a fellow at the New America Foundation in 2017-2018.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/coca-colas-biggest-challenge-in-greening-its-operations-is-its-own-global-marketing-strategy-204725 

ICYMI

“F*** off”: This may become Succession’s most iconic line as fans liken it to other enduring classics like The Sopranos and The Wire. But Succession stands out from them by being uniquely British, Sight & Sound argues in this 2020 piece. Everything from the Roy family’s incompetence to their expensive but boring ‘Hotel Look’ fashion depicts the 1% as fools trapped in a golden cage. American shows about the wealthy, such as Billions, usually depict the 1% life as a product of the ‘American Dream’. Most of all, Succession is underlined by hopelessness. Breaking out of a world fuelled by money and abuse is impossible.

Narcissistic abuse is a core theme here. This Vox story draws parallels between the four Roy children and the four F’s of trauma response—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. It also breaks down how Succession uses wide shots and catchphrases (such as Logan Roy’s second favourite “uh huh”) to depict how narcissists trap people in their orbit in endless power games.

From ugly duckling to golden goose: In 2021, a committee constituted by the Supreme Court of India declared that the value of a single tree with 100 years to live is ₹72 lakh ($87,470). Assigning dollar signs to ecosystem services is increasingly common, because the hope is that calculating nature’s economic productivity will push the uncaring to account for its well-being. Which brings us to the oceans. Seagrasses are taken for granted, but as this WIRED story finds, they may be the most superlative thing on the planet. Did you know they can offset 10 times more carbon than a mature rainforest? That they are both the largest plant and the oldest organism ever (200,000 years), and so indispensable that one man valued their carbon sequestration at $1 trillion? That man is a former IMF economist who’s now devoting his life to valuing ecosystem services. Bonus: you’ll also learn about the value of a blue whale and a bush elephant. Yes, they’re priceless.

Taking on Elon: The world of third-party Twitter apps is quite fascinating. Back in the day, and we’re talking sometime in the early 2010s, several such apps competed for that elusive space on your smartphone. Namely: Twitterific, Echofon, UberTwitter, and TweetDeck (before Twitter acquired it). But Tweetbot, by consensus, was the best of them all. And then, one fine day, Elon “let that sink in” and acquired Twitter. Among his first major steps? Deny access to these very apps for alleged “violation of long-standing API rules.” Even as the lights went off at Tapbots, the Tweetbot maker, the founders made a fresh and bold bet on Mastodon and launched Ivory, a third-party app for the hard-to-understand, decentralised social network. Will it pay off? Until we find out, here’s a must-read Texas Monthly profile of the developer duo behind Tapbots and their fight against Twitter.

The triangular chain: It is undeniable that China, Taiwan, and the US have an umbilical supply chain relationship. The Financial Times argues in a visual story that as the primary producer of essential electronics, Taiwan is indispensable to both superpowers. Both US and Chinese companies depend on chips made in Taiwan for everything, ranging from mobile phones to fighter jets. A lot of components that Taiwan makes are shipped to China to be assembled for western markets. Even though they are at loggerheads, the two countries are also the island nation’s largest trade partners. And the US is cementing its relationship with a trade pact. US companies such as Apple have been trying for years to develop alternative supply chains elsewhere in Asia, but it is taking time. A Taiwan conflict will put $2 trillion of economic activity at risk. That is something Washington and Beijing will worry about.

Greens’ man in the White House: Not many have heard of Richard Revesz. Those who have, The New York Times says, have incredible respect for the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). That’s where proposed laws and rules land up for fine-tuning and fortifying against legal challenges. A climate law expert and former dean of the New York University School of Law, Revesz developed a new method of calculating the cost of regulation that gives potential rules a strong underpinning in court battles. He tweaked the previous method, as old as the George W Bush Presidency, to not only calculate current costs but also account for the benefits the rules will bring to future generations. Earlier, OIRA’s cost-benefit analysis of proposed health, environment, and safety regulations erred on the side of cost-to-business and helped water down or stop regulatory proposals. Naturally, Revesz is the target of the friends of the fossil fuel and chemical industries.

Will the original pop song please stand up?: Pop singer Ed Sheeran may have finally breathed easy after it was declared that he did not copy Marvin Gaye’s song Let’s Get It On last month. Copypasta claims have plagued Sheeran for the most part of his music career. Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and Justin Bieber too have been slapped with similar allegations. Copyright infringement trials certainly won't be the last. The New Yorker tells you why. For one, copying is inadvertent, and "cryptomnesia" makes artists seem like a hack. It doesn't help that most pop songs are made of "three- or four-chord progressions, and have a near-identical blueprint—intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro." This story by John Seabrook reveals why copyright is a thorny issue. Bonus: listen to the allegedly infringed song in this interactive article.