Mexico City. While large corporations and business associations promote "sustainability and eco-friendliness" campaigns, they simultaneously invest in legal teams "to attack and file injunctions" against initiatives that have attempted to eliminate the use of single-use plastics and Styrofoam, experts and researchers denounced.
In Oaxaca, they said, "operators" of the Coca-Cola soft drink company, the Propimex bottling company, and Oxxo stores "lobbied" before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) to stop the state's Anti-Disposable Food Law.
This legislation required large industries, such as soft drink companies, to rethink their packaging; however, "the lobbying from these industries was so strong" that the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJN) took up the case, and "in less than 10 minutes, with four votes in favor," ultimately declared the aforementioned law unconstitutional, without any analysis of human rights or environmental impacts, said Larisa de Orbe of the Acción Ecológica association.
At the press conference "Processing and Packaging: Drowning in Plastics ," convened by El Poder del Consumidor, experts noted that this research showed that most of the millions of containers and packaging used by the food and beverage industry are designed to be single-use.
Despite this, the business sector places the blame for plastic pollution on its consumers and instead promotes "false solutions like recycling," as it is estimated that only 9 percent of these produced materials are recycled.
Among the strategies employed is the promotion of loose definitions of single-use plastics, excluding many of the packaging these same companies produce.
Globally, the biggest plastic polluters include companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Mondelēz International, Unilever, Mars, and Danone, among others.
