Fizz or Fizzle? Shareholders Demand Accountability for Coke’s Sustainability Spending

Washington, D.C. - At Wednesday's Coca-Cola annual meeting, shareholders will be able to amend the company's bylaws in order to create a Corporate Governance and Sustainability Committee to oversee Coke's sustainability commitments.

Item 4, put forward by the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project (FEP), requests that a new Corporate Governance and Sustainability Committee assess at a minimum whether Coca-Cola's sustainability initiatives are approved and maintained "on the basis of net present value (NPV) and return on investment (ROI) calculations."

FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will tell shareholders Wednesday:

Coca-Cola sells bottled beverages. It makes sense to be concerned with water, consumer waste and recycling issues. But there are other issues where the company appears clueless. It has, for example, fallen hook, line and sinker for the climate hoax…. Even if we pretend that emissions affect global climate, Coca-Cola's are so few that it could shut down today and forever, and it would make no difference….

A sustainability issue that Coca-Cola is not paying enough attention to is the junk science-based scare about microplastics…. Ingestion and inhalation of them is harmless…. Yet politicized activist groups are trying to scare people.

Given that much Coca-Cola product packaging is plastic, something must be done - that is about the scare. The threat to corporate sustainability is management failing to defend the company.

"Coca-Cola should be educating the public and policymakers to defuse the microplastics scare - not fretting the global climate hoax which it can do nothing about," Milloy will say. "The solution to navigating sustainability issues is smarter management."

Coca-Cola shareholders can support Item 4 by voting their proxies before Wednesday's meeting.