Coke's Green Costume

There is a conundrum that big companies, try as they might, can't get around: As a business grows, it does more harm to the environment.

To flesh out this idea, Fortune magazine's Marc Gunther could have picked just about any public company with a "green initiative" (which would be just about any public company). He chose Coca-Cola, which was a good choice because, even given how ubiquitous "going green" is among American businesses, "few companies take environmental issues more seriously." Or at least, few companies market themselves so heavily as greener-than-thou.

But whatever efforts the company might make, Gunther concludes, "the more stuff that Coke sells, the more it is likely to emit, pollute and consume natural resources."

The news peg Gunther chose—Coke's announcement this week that it is extending its partnership with the World Wildlife Fund on efforts to reduce water consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases.

Let's forget for the moment that Coke sells water in plastic bottles, which counteracts both goals in a way that few products do. And let's forget that many of its products, including its flagship soda brands, are made mostly of water. Even if Coke produced dollhouses or jackhammers, it would do more marginal harm to the environment with every new unit it produced.

But Coke does sell water in plastic bottles, and no matter what it might do to limit the marginal harm done by each new bottle it produces, the best thing it could do to help the environment would be to stop selling it.

Of course, that's not going to happen any time soon, so Gunther ignores the notion and concentrates on what Coke is doing to mitigate the harm it does—using water more efficiently, for example, and reducing the amount of greenhouse gases it emits per unit. These efforts, he says "deserve praise."

But, he notes, getting back to the central conundrum, that Coke "expects to use more water in 2012 than it does now because its business is growing, particularly outside of the U.S." And the company's total emissions of greenhouse gases have actually increased in recent years.

"You see the problem, right? Coke is conceding that it can't grow (the business) and shrink (its footprint) at the same time. I say this not to point a finger at Coke, but to point to the limits of what any company going 'green' can do."

But why not point the finger at Coke? When it comes down to it, all of the company's eco-initiatives, laudable as they may be individually, mean little as long as it continues to sell bottled water.