A Bristol-based environmental campaign group has slammed Recycle Week, which ends this Sunday, as corporate greenwashing by highlighting that it is being sponsored by what it called “some of the worst polluters in the world”.
Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and McDonald’s are among the global giants backing Recycle Week, the national event that aims to motive individuals to recycle more. 
Now in its 19th year, it is staged by the Recycle Now, part of the international recycling awareness group WRAP.
But City to Sea, the not-for-profit group campaigning to stop plastic pollution at source, rubbished it as “an echo of the plastic industry’s long-standing excuses for inaction” by passing the blame for the crisis onto individuals rather than corporates.
Instead, it said the scale of the plastic crisis demanded an unveiling of the ‘recycling myth’, pointing to a research paper showing that just 9% of the 8.3bn tonnes of virgin plastic produced worldwide is thought to have been recycled.
Best global estimates put the current recycling rate on about 20% of all plastics, it added.
City to Sea policy manager Steve Hynd said: “It’s transparently nonsense to have the world’s biggest plastic polluters like Coca-Cola as sponsors of recycling week. 
“This is greenwashing the dirties of business models, nothing more and nothing less.
“To ask people to recycle more is an echo of the plastic industry’s language of long-standing excuses for inaction that demands people to mop up the mess faster while they keep flooding our communities with single-use plastics.”
City to Sea also says a report by global campaign group Break Free From Plastic has revealed Coca-Cola to be the world’s worst polluter four years in a row with rival PepsiCo the second worst. In 2019 Coca-Cola admitted producing 200,000 single-use bottles a minute.
It is estimated that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and McDonald’s alone are ‘responsible for 39% of UK’s branded packaging pollution’, according to City to Sea.
The campaign group also slammed the inclusion of waste company Biffa among the sponsors of Recycle Week.
The UK’s largest waste firm recently made headlines for selling soiled nappies abroad as part of its recycled content and last year was fined £1.5m for “four offences of exporting poorly-sorted household waste from its recycling facility”.
Steve Hynd added: “Recycle Week asks us ‘to get real’ about recycling. So here it is, the unvarnished truth – we can’t recycle our way out of this plastic crisis whatever your corporate paymasters might say.
“We need a massive reduction in plastic production and an entire revolution in refillable and reusable packaging.
“This is something the big plastic polluters won’t say because it undermines their polluting business model.
“Genuine environmentalists will do well to remember that for as long as they take money from these big polluters they will always be stopped from speaking this truth.”
City to Sea began its award-winning campaigns with a mission to tackle the ever-growing amount of single-use plastic items found on beaches and in rivers and oceans by providing practical, solutions-focused initiatives and championing reuse over single-use.
By working with communities, businesses and retailers it aims to inspire and empower everyone to tackle plastic pollution.
