The lawsuit says the companies knew the limitations of plastics recycling but promoted it anyway.
Los Angeles County announced last week that it’s suing PepsiCo and Coca-Cola over plastic pollution, arguing that the soda giants’ plastic bottles have harmed public health and the environment and that the companies knowingly misled the public about their products’ recyclability.
“Coke and Pepsi need to stop the deception and take responsibility for the plastic pollution problems your products are causing,” said Los Angeles County Board Chair Lindsey P. Horvath in a statement. The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s “deceptive business practices” — their sustainability claims — plus civil penalties and restitution for consumers who were misled by those claims.
The 41-page complaint starts with an overview of the plastic pollution crisis and how single-use plastics affect California and L.A. County specifically. Although L.A. County is investing millions of dollars to collect and manage plastic litter — for example, through street sweepings and large trash booms at the mouths of the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek — it simply can’t keep up with the scale of the problem.
Single-use plastics “continually wash into county waterways and storm and sewer systems,” the suit says. Once in the environment, plastic trash can break down into microplastics and leach endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as BPA and phthalates.
Then the complaint describes Coke and Pepsi’s outsize contribution to these problems, using an analysis from an annual “brand audit” conducted by the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic. Last year, the audit found the beverage makers to be the world’s top two plastic polluters, as determined by the collections of plastic with their branding on it by volunteers at global beach cleanups, which turned up more of their products than any other companies’. These results are “consistent with pollution rates in Los Angeles County,” according to the complaint.
Pepsi and Coke are among the largest companies in the world; Pepsi’s market cap is about $228 billion, and Coke’s is $282 billion. In addition to their eponymous lines of soft drinks, the two companies collectively own numerous beverage brands including Dasani, Fresca, and PowerAde (Coca-Cola products), and Aquafina, Gatorade, and Mountain Dew (PepsiCo products) — all of which are sold in single-use plastic bottles.
“I have a lot of both fear and anger with the plastic I’m forced to interact with everyday,” said Emily Parker, an L.A. County resident and a coastal and marine scientist at the nonprofit Heal the Bay, which was not involved in the complaint. “It’s not possible to live and function without coming into contact with plastic.”
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The crux of the suit, however, is the claim that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo knew about the problems their plastic bottles would cause — and that they deliberately misled the public about them, particularly through promotion of plastic recycling, but also through general claims about building a “stronger, more sustainable future for us all.” L.A. County paints these as cynical efforts to appease concerned members of the public, and describes a pattern of missing or failing to make progress on quantitative targets for reducing the use of plastics.
According to L.A. County, Coke and Pepsi have framed plastics recycling as a central solution to the plastics crisis, misleadingly stating or implying that their bottles are or will one day be endlessly recyclable. But due to material constraints, plastic bottles cannot be turned into new bottles repeatedly; most plastics recycling is “downcycling,” meaning it is converted into lower-quality plastic products like Adirondack chairs that cannot themselves be recycled. Scientists have estimated that, of all the plastic produced between 1950 and 2015, only 0.9 percent was recycled more than once.
The complaint requests that the companies pay restitution “to all victims of their unfair and deceptive business practices,” and that they pay civil penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation of California’s false advertising and unfair competition laws.
In response to a request for comment, Pepsi and Coke referred Grist to William Dermody, vice president of media and public affairs for the American Beverage Association, an industry group. Dermody said it was “simply not true” that plastic bottles aren’t recycled; in California, he cited a statistic saying that polyethylene terephthalate bottles like Coke’s and Pepsi’s are recycled at a rate of 70 percent. He said the companies’ bottles are “designed to be recycled and remade and can include up to 100 percent recycled plastics.”
L.A. County’s complaint says Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s advertisements obscure the fact that the vast majority of the plastic they use is virgin, not recycled. In 2022, only 13.6 percent of the plastic Coke sourced was recycled; that number was 6 percent for Pepsi.
Eric Buescher, a senior attorney for the nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper, said lawsuits like L.A. County’s could “snowball” if they prove to be effective. “If they win and get a great result, there’s gonna be a lot of copycat litigation,” he said.
That said, a similar lawsuit filed last year by New York Attorney General Letitia James against PepsiCo was dismissed last week on the grounds that it should be up to the legislative or executive branch to tackle plastic pollution and misinformation. The judge said that, while he could think of “no reasonable person who does not believe in the imperatives of recycling and being better stewards of our environment, this does not give rise to phantom assertions of liability that do nothing to solve the problem that exists.”
Buescher said this seemed like a “hostile” way to approach the issue. “Generally, people are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct and for misleading others about them,” he said. “And reducing the amount of plastic manufactured into single-use products would certainly seem to be a way to at least partially solve the problem.”
It remains to be seen whether other judges will agree with Buescher. Several lawsuits are still pending, including one brought by the city of Baltimore in June against Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Frito Lay over the “public nuisance” represented by their litter, and one brought by the Sierra Club in 2021 against Coca-Cola and other beverage makers for labeling their bottles as “100 percent recyclable.” Buescher’s own organization, along with Heal the Bay, Surfrider, and the Sierra Club, recently filed a complaint against a company further up the supply chain: Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest producer of polymers used to make plastics. California Attorney General Rob Bonta also sued Exxon Mobil over false advertising and environmental pollution.
Parker, with Heal the Bay, said all the lawsuits share the same overarching goal: to stop companies from producing so much plastic. “I’ve been involved in plastic pollution work for a long time, and the thing that we’ve learned is that cleanup is never enough,” she said. “We have to be holding all types of plastic producers responsible for the mess they’ve made of our environment and for the harm that’s being caused to our bodies.”