If you used a plastic bottle in the last week,
and you didn't recycle it,
there's a good chance that 450 years from now
that plastic bottle might still be here on this planet.
And that's because NOAA researchers have recently discovered
that it takes about 450 freaking years
for a PET, polyethylene terephthalate bottle,
PET bottle, to fully decompose.
So I can imagine the scene 450 years from now
when some poor soul picks up your bottle from the ground
and turns to his friend for a conversation.
It might go something like this:
"Hey bro," - they'll still be saying bro, by the way, in 450 -
"Can you believe this?! I mean, wait a minute,
they took a finite natural resource,
fossil fuels,
and tell me this - they turned it into a container
that they used one time?
And then, after they were done with that container,
they threw it away?!
I mean, that's crazy!
What sort of advanced civilization does that?"
I think they're going to be looking for an explanation.
And if I was going to try and offer an explanation to them today,
I would turn to this logo.
A logo that we've been surrounded by since we were in elementary school,
something we see every day.
It's the recycling logo, of course, and it was created in 1970
by a graduate student named Gary Anderson,
who was at the University of Southern California.
Recycling was just coming online at the time,
and he wanted to figure out a way to describe this system
that would be this kind of closed loop.
You know, a system in which everything within it
would be used over and over again.
We would just have this world without waste.
It looks great, and it makes us feel pretty darn good, I think,
when we go to the recycling bin and we put our stuff in that bin.
But the problem with this image, is that it's a lie.
Because today, only about 30%,
30% of PET plastic bottles used in this country are recycled.
That means that 70%, 70% of these bottles
end up in landfills, in our rivers, and ultimately in our oceans.
And this of course is contributing to a problem of epic proportions.
Scientists have recently said and predicted that by the year 2050,
there might be more plastic in our oceans than fish by volume,
which is absolutely crazy.
And if we think about all that plastic churning around,
one of the issues is that particles are ending up in our water supply.
Microplastics.
A study that was recently conducted
showed that 94% of tap water tested in this country
had microplastics within it.
You're drinking it.
This is not something, in other words, that's just out there in our oceans.
This is something that's right here inside of us.
And it's something that we have to figure out.
How do we end this plastic pollution plague that we're confronting?
Well, to answer that, I want to suggest that we don't some new technology
or even a new gadget to solve this problem.
What we need is a better understanding of our past,
a better understanding of history.
And I can think of, when I think of plastic containers,
no better history to turn to than the history of this company:
The Coca-Cola Company.
A company I spent 10 years or so traveling around the world,
to Peru, India, and beyond,
to understand the ecological footprint of this firm that started in my hometown.
And I get it.
This is an unusual place to start
when thinking about a solution to the plastic problem.
Because I think when we think about Coke, we think of the corporate villain.
This plastic, these bottles that they're putting out.
Greenpeace, for example,
said that Coca-Cola put out about 100 billion plastic bottles in a year.
That's about 1/5 of all the plastic bottles that are produced on the planet!
So they're part of the problem.
But if we turn to their past,
if we turn to Coke's history, buried in the archives,
I think there are solutions for the future.
So, let's go back to the past,
and let's visit with this guy, John Pemberton,
who was the creator of the Coca-Cola formula.
John Pemberton was a pharmacist.
He came to Atlanta in the 1870s
trying to strike it rich in this patent medicine market.
But unfortunately, his business burned down not once, but twice!
And he went bankrupt by the end of the 1870s.
It doesn't sound like the guy
who's going to be the best-selling brand in the world, right?
It sounds like somebody who's never going to make it.
So what do you do when you're out of luck and you want to make a buck?
Well, you look at the world, and you say,
okay, what's a drink that's really doing awesome right now,
and I'll try and imitate it.
And that's exactly what John Pemberton did.
He saw this drink, Vin Mariani, coming out of France.
It was named after a guy named Angelo Mariani.
And it was selling like wildfire.
Here's why, it was a Bordeaux wine, a red wine,
mixed with the coca leaf from South America
that would've infused it with small tinctures of cocaine.
So we're talking about, folks, cocaine-infused wine.
(Laughter)
It was stimulating,
(Laughter)
and quite exhilarating.
Our president Ulysses S. Grant drank this stuff.
"Mmm, makes me feel good."
Of course it does, Ulysses S. Grant, it's got cocaine in it.
(Laughter)
And the other thing is,
he's sitting there saying this is good stuff.
It was like the Four Loko, really, of the 19th century if you think about it.
Even the Pope drank this stuff, okay?
So if you're not Catholic out there, imagine this.
If communion had Vin Mariani,
I think we'd all be signing up to be Catholic today.
So John Pemberton's out of luck
trying to figure out how to make some money,
sees this and says, alright, let's go do this.
And folks, this is the precursor to what becomes Coca-Cola.
This is the first advertisement for it in the 1880s.
It was called Pemberton's Wine of Coca.
Not very original, completely copying that drink, Vin Mariani.
And it was a red wine mixed with the coca leaf.
Yes, it would have had wine in it.
And it would have had small quantities of cocaine.
He made it!
Yes, this great drink is selling! But, there was a problem.
And the problem was not the cocaine.
The problem was the alcohol
because the city of Atlanta moved to ban the sale of alcohol in 1885.
Oh my gosh, he's got this great drink, now he's got to give it up!
What's he going do?
You know what he's going to do - he creates Coca-Cola.
It is a non-alcoholic version,
a temperance version of that earlier wine-based drink.
And it became this great thing
years later.
Now, Pemberton did not put it in bottles.
It was sold just at soda fountains
in little cups like the cute cup you see here.
And he would never actually see this drink become bottled
or go global because he dies.
It's a sad story.
He finally makes it, and he dies.
And so the person that follows after him is Asa Candler, his successor.
And that's the real success of Coke.
Asa Candler's a pharmacist who incorporates Coca-Cola in 1892.
And he's going to create this great brand.
Asa Candler, by the way,
was a kind of workaholic, puritanical Sunday-school-teacher kind of guy.
I scoured the archives
for the happiest picture I could find of Asa Candler.
This is Asa Candler on a good day.
This is Asa Candler smiling.
And the important point here
is that like Pemberton, these guys were in the Reconstruction South.
They did not have a lot of money.
They didn't have a lot of money,
so they knew the only way they could spread this drink far and wide
is if they partnered with people.
And Asa Candler's brilliant idea was to bottle Coke.
In 1899, he makes the decision to bottle Coca-Cola.
And that would change not only Coca-Cola, it would change the world,
creating one of the biggest distribution networks
the world has ever seen,
stretching from Alabama all the way to Zimbabwe.
It was an incredible system.
But the only way that it worked
was if small businessmen in little towns across the country
and then ultimately the globe put forward a little bit of money
to build these bottling plants in basements,
in little small buildings across the country.
And these were folks, again, with not a lot of money.
They cared about everything,
all the costs, the bottles, the laborers, the trucks.
They had to think about all that.
When it came to packaging,
they couldn't afford to waste their packaging.
They had to reuse it over and over again to save on cost.
So they used returnable glass bottles,
returnable glass bottles in the early 20th century
so that they would save on cost.
But here's the key. How did that returnable system work?
Well, they put a deposit on those containers.
A deposit of one to two cents.
And if you, as a consumer,
brought your bottle back to your distributor,
you got one to two cents back.
You got paid!
And it was an incredible system!
It worked!
I went through the archives to look at this system.
We're talking about 80% of Coca-Cola bottlers
were using a deposit system in 1929.
The trade journals of the time said the only sane and logical,
literally "sane and logical" thing to do is to put a price on packaging
if you want it to be returned. Right?
And you've got to understand
this is at a time when the drink's selling for five cents.
So you're talking about a two-cent deposit on a five-cent drink.
Heck yeah, I'm bringing that thing back! I want my two cents back!
Forty percent markup. Incredible.
I have evidence in 1960s that shows bottles doing 40, 50 trips
back and forth between their bottler and their consumer.
Folks, it worked. It worked really, really well.
So what happened?
Well, in the 1960s and 1970s,
Coca-Colas began switching to throw-away single-use containers
that we see today.
First steel cans, then aluminum cans,
and then finally plastic bottles by the 1970s.
And when they switched to that system,
they said, look, this is a new automobile age.
People are on the move. People want convenience.
They want to be able to put the packaging wherever they want. Right?
We don't need a deposit system or a returnable system.
We got rid of those deposits.
And as you might predict, trash started piling up everywhere,
national parks, rivers, oceans.
And people said this is a problem.
But Coke, one of the biggest movers and shakers in the beverage industry,
said, don't worry,
because there's this new thing called recycling,
that was just emerging in the 1970s.
And this is what's going to reclaim all this waste.
We don't need a deposit system.
That recycling technology can reclaim it all.
It was a huge bet. It was a big gamble.
And they thought it would pay off.
But the thing is we now as historians can look back at over four decades of data
to see whether that gamble paid off.
And looking at the late 1990s
when curbside recycling was really in full steam here
in the United States, coming up to today,
this is the reality of what happened.
Not only did recycling rates not skyrocket
when we started really imposing these curbside recycling systems,
for many years it declined.
And in recent years we're seeing this kind of stagnation
with this rate around 30%.
This is a system in absolute crisis.
You see that circle? It's not a circle.
So how do we fix it?
Well, we know the answers, right?
We know from history that when you put a price on packaging,
when you value that packaging, it will be reclaimed.
And we don't have to guess whether that system will work today.
We can see it in action.
I'm mentioning Michigan at Ohio State thing, I know.
But this is Michigan doing a great thing here, okay?
They have got a system that has deposits in place.
The citizens of that state and in Maine
have enforced their own deposits via law
to say that you have to put a price on a container.
In those states if you go and deliver those containers,
you get some money back.
And I just wanted to show you, the rates are through the roof -
80, 90% recycling rates.
And if we go to Denmark or Germany -
I could list a lot of different countries,
whose nations have taken it upon themselves to do this system -
we see the recycling rates through the roof.
It works.
And we can make it work here across this nation.
So Coca-Cola said that by the year 2030,
they're going to reclaim and recycle every single container
that they put out into the environment.
This is the pledge they have recently made.
They're going to reclaim every single container.
There will be a world without waste, they say.
And I applaud them for this.
There's a lot of well-meaning people in the companies
thinking about these big strategies.
But the problem is, in 2016, as recently as 2016,
in a leaked corporate document,
Coca-Cola said that it was going to,
"fight back against deposit systems in the European Union."
Folks, we don't have to wait for Coke to get woke.
(Laughter)
We, the citizens of this country, can make the conscious choice
to end the unconscionable practice of not putting a price on packaging,
especially finite resources like plastics.
If we do that, if we learn from our history,
then I think we'll make history.
And it will be a history that our descendants can be proud of
450 years from now.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)