NLPC presented a shareholder proposal today at The Coca-Cola Company‘s annual meeting of shareholders that asked the company to revisit its plastics packaging policies, to implement serious scientific and economic analyses instead of following environmentalism alarmist agenda priorities.
The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on page 91 of its proxy statement. NLPC responded to the board’s opposition statement in an exempt solicitation report circulated to the company’s shareholders.
Presenting the proposal at the meeting was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. An audio recording of his presentation can be found here, and a transcript of his three-minute remarks follows:
Good morning.
I’m Paul Chesser, and I am presenting this proposal on behalf of the National Legal and Policy Center.
We are not here to argue that Coca-Cola should ignore the environment.
We are here because we believe the Company’s plastics packaging policies are not grounded in objective science or rigorous economics — and that shareholders are bearing the cost of that gap.
In 2018, Coca-Cola launched its “World Without Waste” initiative, committing to 100 percent recyclable packaging by 2025, a reduction of 3 million metric tons of virgin plastic use, and collection of the equivalent of every bottle it sells.
None of those targets has been met.
In December 2024, the Company quietly rolled back all of its goals — pushing every deadline to 2035, eliminating the virgin plastic reduction target entirely, and abandoning its reusable packaging commitment.
That revision came on the same day that United Nations plastics treaty negotiations concluded without an agreement — raising a reasonable question about whether these voluntary commitments were ever grounded in genuine operational analysis.
The peer-reviewed science does not support the assumptions underlying this strategy.
A 2024 study in Environmental Science & Technology found that plastic products produce fewer lifecycle polluting emissions than their alternatives in 15 of 16 categories studied.
PET plastic bottles have substantially lower emissions than glass or aluminum — the very alternatives the circular economy agenda favors.
Yet Coca-Cola has committed to increasing the recycled content of its packaging — even as recycled PET commands a significant price premium over virgin material, and even as the U.S. bottle collection rate slipped to just 30 percent in 2024.
The Board argues that its packaging strategy already incorporates lifecycle assessment and economic analysis.
But the Company’s opposition to our proposal cites a single industry source — while our exempt solicitation report draws on 46 endnotes from peer-reviewed journals, respected trade publications, and the Company’s own disclosures.
Shareholders deserve better than that imbalance.
Our proposal asks the Board to commission and publish — at reasonable cost — an independent evaluation of these policies based on non-biased, verifiable, and economically thorough research, by March 2027.
That is not a radical request.
It is exactly the kind of analysis a board of directors should conduct before committing billions in capital to a packaging strategy derived from advocacy organizations rather than independent science.
We ask shareholders to vote FOR Item 5.
Thank you.
All assertions made by Chesser in his above remarks are footnoted and can be found in NLPC’s exempt solicitation report, here. An executive summary of the report can be viewed here.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for the Coca-Cola annual meeting here.
Listen to Chesser’s presentation of the proposal at the meeting here.
