Brands are falling over themselves to make grand commitments around reducing their impact on the planet. And the vow-making will surely get still more fervent during COP26.

Coca-Cola – responsible for a quarter of the 470 billion plastic bottles sold globally every year – made its own promises to reduce plastic waste a couple of years ago. Is it sticking to its pledge? Is it fizz, suggested Panorama: Coca-Cola’s 100 Billion Bottle Problem (BBC1, 25 October, 7.35pm).

With the help of experts and on-the-ground reporting, the programme picked apart Coke’s recycling oaths. Take Samoa, where Coca-Cola came in glass bottles and were returned for a deposit until very recently. Since the bottling facility closed in February, it now comes in plastic containers.

“Within days we saw more plastic littering. That was a shock,” says one resident. Too small to warrant its own recycling facility, the island nation collects the trash, but export costs make it unfeasible to send elsewhere. So it just piles up. It’s a similar story in Uganda and the Philippines, where Coke’s plastic wreaks havoc on the environment.

The real tragedy of all this is that once upon a time Coca-Cola was sold everywhere in returnable and rarely littered glass bottles, washed and refilled at the company’s cost.

“And then along came plastic,” said one expert. “They realised they could effectively externalise all of those costs on to the municipalities.”

Now, it seems, developing nations and the planet too are paying the price for Coca-Cola’s profits.

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