The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink

by Michael Blanding

  Coke hardly could have picked a worse place in India to set up shop than Plachimada. Like Chiapas in Mexico, Kerala has long been a state apart in India, setting up a socialist government in the 1950s and now trading political power between two left-leaning coalitions. The state’s social consciousness has led to a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and health stats far above the national average. On the other hand, the antibusiness climate had led to high unemployment, and given Kerala a reputation of little more than a haven for restless trade unions and righteous NGOs.

  Coinciding with Coke’s arrival, Kerala had also seen a surge in political consciousness of India’s indigenous people, the Adivasis, who had won a huge victory in October 2001, when the state returned a portion of their ancestral lands. Emboldened by their newfound political muscle, some Adivasis from Plachimada turned their attentions to the Coke plant. After the problems with water started emerging, some urged to shut the plant down by force. A leftist intellectual who had advised the community in the land campaign, however, urged patience, worried the village would face a backlash if it resorted to violence. “I told them their strength was in the local, but their weakness was in not being able to reach out of the local,” says C. R. Bijoy. “We had to make the local space a space of struggle.”

  Under the leadership of Mailamma and an Adivasi tribal chief, Veloor Swaminathan, that is exactly what they did, constructing a forty-foot thatched-roof hut directly across from the plant, which still exists in perfect repair, hung with framed pictures of Gandhi at his spinning wheel among propaganda posters. There they settled in for an around-the-clock sit-in that eventually lasted more than four years and has since been used as a textbook study for how a small group of citizens with limited resources can take down a rich multinational.

  At each stage of the protest, the villagers worked with what they had, to gather first evidence, and then support, and gradually expand locally, nationally, and even internationally. From the beginning they sought to legitimize their experience with hard evidence. Sending the water out to a local lab, they were validated to find levels of dissolved minerals so high it was “unfit for human consumption, domestic use (bathing and washing), and for irrigation.”

  Armed with that science, the villagers demanded that the local council, the Perumatty Panchayat, cancel the plant’s license to operate. But the council dragged its feet in the face of Coke’s own tests contradicting the villagers’ claims of water depletion and pollution. “In the beginning we were not against the plant, because so many people were getting employment,” admits former village council president A. Krishnan. “We told them we cannot take any action without investigating.”

  By now, protests in front of the plant attracted hundreds—and on some days, thousands—of people. As word spread, outside groups such as the Indian branch of Greenpeace used the situation to decry the liberalization of the Indian economy as a cautionary tale of the evils of globalization, adding their own foot soldiers to the protest. The village was fast becoming an activist carnival. For each outside group, villagers would show off their depleted wells, let them taste the water, show them the failed attempts to boil rice. Sympathetic stories in the media followed, emphasizing the David versus Goliath aspects of the story, and day by day political pressure grew.

  Eventually, both of the state’s two communist parties declared their support for the villagers. Coke maintained the support of the mainstream Congress Party, which then controlled Kerala’s parliament, and the left-of-center Janata Dal (Secular) Party, which controlled the local village council. But the panchayat was wavering in the face of the activist occupation of the village—and Coke itself pushed it over the edge when they rebuffed the council’s request for information to dispute the activists’ claims. “They were just too arrogant,” says Krishnan. “They said we’ve already talked to the big guys, we don’t need to talk to you guys.”

  Stung by the response, the panchayat reversed itself, revoking the plant’s operating license on April 9, 2003, a year after the protest had begun. The stage was set for a showdown with the state government, which still supported the company. Just at that moment, in July 2003, a BBC radio crew appeared on the scene and dramatically changed the game. Told by farmers that Coke had distributed solid waste as fertilizer, the crew took a sample back to analyze its nutrient content to see if it actually could be used to help grow crops.

  No one expected the results they found. The tests from the University of Exeter revealed not only that the sludge was useless as fertilizer, but also that it contained dangerous levels of the toxic heavy metals lead and cadmium. Samples taken from a nearby well also found toxic levels of lead and cadmium, which is known to cause prostate and kidney cancer with prolonged exposure.

  The news report rocked the country, from Plachimada to Mehdiganj. After years of anecdotal reports that the sludge was harmful to livestock and crop production, here at last was proof from an internationally respected news agency. India has long had a double standard about Western foreign countries. On one hand, the long shame of colonialism has created a fierce animosity toward foreign influences—evidenced by the early backlash against Coke. On the other hand, the long period of British rule has created an almost reflexive deference to foreigners. While the tests by the Indian company hadn’t resonated, the evidence from a respected British university couldn’t be ignored.

  Shamed before the international press, the Kerala Pollution Control Board did its own tests, concluding within a week that Coke’s sludge contained levels of cadmium four times the tolerable limit of 50 milligrams per kilogram. The following day, the Janata Dal Party held a joint press conference with the panchayat. Not only did it support the local government in revoking the license, party officials said, but it also vowed to pursue legal action to close down the plant.

  In the midst of this controversy, Coke was blindsided by the release of another report that helped turn the growing local backlash into a national movement. A month after the BBC report, on August 5, 2003, a Delhi-based environmental group called the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) called a press conference on a sweltering day in the nation’s capital to announce to a crowded room of journalists that soft drinks around the country contained dangerous levels of pesticides. Coca-Cola, it reported, contained residues of DDT and malathion forty-five times the European standards. (Pepsi, too, was called out, for containing pesticides at thirty-seven times the European standards.)

  The issue struck directly at the heart of urban India, where the majority of soft drinks were consumed. No longer was this a question of stealing water from poor farmers, this was a company poisoning everyone. Indian consumers, the findings implied, were not worth the same care that companies lavished on consumers in the United States and Europe where Coke was pesticide-free. Coke’s famous promise that its products were the same everywhere in the world had been exposed as a lie.

  The day after the announcement, national pride kicked in. India’s right-wing Parliament immediately banned the sale of soft drinks in its cafeteria, while protesters in Mumbai (Bombay) symbolically broke Coke bottles and trampled on logo-bearing cups. Elsewhere, angry Indians tore down posters of Bollywood film stars Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, who’d just signed endorsement deals with the company. The reaction from the industry was swift, if cynical. “Within days, Coke’s men from the Hong Kong group office were in Delhi to personally assess the situation,” wrote Nantoo Banerjee, Coke’s former head of public relations, in a scathing tell-all about his former company. “The key message was: manage Parliament, manage ministers, and manage media. . . . To them, everything in India appeared to be ‘manageable’ with money and connections.” Led by Coca-Cola India, the soft drink industry published a full-page ad in India’s English-language newspapers stating on the basis of its own tests “we can safely assert that there is no contamination or toxicity whatsoever in our brand of beverages.” The facility CSE used to measure its own tests, the company went on to say, was not accredited
highly enough, causing the tests to be hopelessly flawed.

  The PR campaign did nothing to dim the public fury—sales of Coke plummeted more than 30 percent in just two weeks. The final blow came when a Joint Parliamentary Committee backed up CSE’s findings, saying its study was “correct on the presence of pesticide residues in . . . branded products of Coca-Cola.” The company changed courses to diffuse blame. Rather than claiming its drinks did not contain pesticides, it now argued it wasn’t their fault if they did, since hazardous chemicals were endemic to the Indian food and water supply. If the government didn’t enforce its environmental regulations, then how could the company be expected to abide by them? Coke, they argued, has just been singled out to further CSE’s own political agenda, exploiting the fact they were a foreign company to sway public opinion.

  CSE’s Kushal Yadav, however, disputes Coke’s contention that “everything has pesticides.” In fact, he says, tests on fruits, vegetables, and sugar found relatively few cases of pesticide contamination. If soft drinks were contaminated, he concluded, it was from the groundwater that Coke was not cleaning—despite the state-of-the-art water-intake treatment system that the company now shows off at its plant in Mehdiganj.

  Whatever the cause, the pesticide story garnered more anti-Coke press in a week than the struggles around groundwater depletion and contamination had in over a year. Coke’s most valuable asset—its brand—had been tarnished, and its reputation called into question. A public that had mostly ignored a problem affecting the very livelihood of some of the world’s most desperate people had been galvanized by contamination of a daily treat for the middle class. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the pesticide situation, the overmatched villagers fighting Coke plants in Kerala may never have achieved the opening for national—and international—recognition.

  “On the contrary,” says Yadav. The pesticide issue “brought out in the open the other issues. Groundwater depletion, groundwater pollution, all of these issues came to the fore.” And in the summer of 2003, they began emerging in Coke’s home country as well, as the situation in India garnered more and more press in the United States—mostly through the work of one Indian-American activist who worked tirelessly to raise the issue.

  Amit Srivastava was born in the United States, when his father, a business management professor, was on a sabbatical at the University of Illinois. His parents were originally from the Indian state of Bihar, a few hundred miles east of Varanasi. He spent his childhood in Tanzania and India, getting a crash course in poverty before going back to Illinois for high school. Originally, he entered the University of Illinois for computer engineering but felt increasingly under pressure to do, not to learn. “I realized very quickly I was never cut out for college work,” he says in a taxi, speeding through the agricultural fields outside Varanasi. After his nontraditional upbringing, he never lost a sense of outrage wherever he saw exploitation in his adopted homeland. He dropped out of college and began traveling around the country to organize college students to fight for environmental justice in their communities—frequently involving big corporations he accused of polluting the environment and exploiting people.

  Now sporting a ponytail and baseball cap, he looks like he is hardly out of college, despite his forty-four years of age. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, he was frustrated by a lack of awareness of the environmental justice issues he was pushing. Environmentalism then was about saving whales and rain forests, not exposing cancer clusters around Baton Rouge. But he continued fighting, traveling overseas to Norway and Japan to tackle issues in those countries as well. When India began liberalizing its economy in the 1990s, he was naturally drawn home.

  “At the time, the entry of corporations into India was a new thing,” he says. “I realized the movement in India could stand to benefit from an active movement in some of these countries like the United States where decisions were being made.” He launched the India Resource Center in 2002 with a budget of $60,000 a year, much of it originally provided by Body Shop founder Anita Roddick—a true believer in the spirit of corporate social responsibility who had recently traveled to Plachimada and decried Coke’s insensitivity there. After traveling there himself the following year, Srivastava knew he’d found a nemesis worthy of his time. “I’ll spend my whole life on Coca-Cola if I have to, why not?” he asks.

  Despite the growing attention Plachimada was receiving in the international press, the local activists in Kerala were skeptical of being co-opted by international nonprofits who wanted to use the fight to push their own issues. Srivastava came to them with the proposal not to support their struggle from afar but to take the issue to the home of Coke itself—the United States. “The whole point is not to support the struggle, it is to join the struggle,” says C. R. Bijoy. “One of the people who picked up on this was Amit.”

  Like Ray Rogers, Srivastava realized early on that the vulnerability of Coke lay in its brand image. In fact, he hooked up with Rogers in New York in spring 2004 “walking out with two boxes full of propaganda” to begin organizing on college campuses. From then on, anytime SINALTRAINAL raised its own issues on campus, it also mentioned India; when Srivastava made his own visits to campuses, he brought up anti-union violence in Colombia. While Srivastava admits that the Indian situation isn’t as dramatic as the murders that took place in Colombia, he argues that in some ways it is more compelling, since the bottling plants there were actually owned by the company in Atlanta, not contracted out to a separate franchisee, making Coke’s alleged infractions more direct. And while the violent civil war in Colombia is unique, Coke’s water use is an issue all over the world.

  An increasingly militant movement in both Plachimada and Mehdiganj began using more direct tactics to put pressure on Coke. Word of the BBC report about Coke’s toxic sludge gave new fire to the community in Mehdiganj, which demanded its local pollution control board carry out tests. But Uttar Pradesh (UP), the state in which Varanasi is located, is not Kerala. Both culturally and politically, the state is strictly ordered along caste lines, with the Shudra and Dalit castes populating the rural villages strictly separated from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes populating finance and industry. It also has a reputation for being one of the more corrupt states in the country. In 2009, a few months before the Lok Samiti graduation ceremony, police arrested the regional head of the state pollution control board in Varanasi—the person responsible for overseeing the Mehdiganj Coke plant. They charged him with taking a bribe from another business in exchange for a “no objection” certificate allowing it to operate.

  Years earlier, however, the pollution control board not only declined to test Coke’s sludge, but also denied Coke was even distributing it to farmers. “The pollution control board said, ‘We have visited the village and they are not doing this,’ ” says Nandlal. “ ‘If you have seen this, show it to us.’” Exasperated, he and his fellow activists appeared at the board’s offices one day with a sack full of sludge and dumped it on the desk of the clerk: “We kind of took him hostage.” Several dozen protesters blocked the main entrance until officials agreed to investigate.

  By this time, the establishments in Mehdiganj and Plachimada weren’t the only bottling plants facing controversy. A study by the state pollution board in West Bengal found toxic levels of cadmium in the effluent of three plants around Kolkata. And in 2003, the Central Pollution Control Board conducted tests of sludge from sixteen Coke and Pepsi plants—and found eight Coke plants to have excessive levels of lead and cadmium. And it added a third toxin: chromium, a heavy metal that causes skin rashes and dermatitis on contact and is a suspected carcinogen with repeated ingestion. The agency henceforth ordered Coca-Cola to treat its waste as hazardous, requiring disposal in specially lined concrete landfills.

  More recently, the nonprofit Hazards Centre has continued to confirm the presence of toxic heavy metals around Coke plants. Located on Delhi’s southern fringes in a cramped concrete apartment building, the office is a buzzing hive of
young researchers sitting around computers. In the middle sits director Dunu Roy, sporting a white ponytail and balding slightly on top.

  Roy’s group first did an assessment of Plachimada’s groundwater back in 2006; since then it has done assessments of water conditions at five other Coke plants around India, publishing a report in 2010. In each location, the scientists measured the presence of lead, cadmium, and chromium in both the groundwater and the effluent coming directly out of the plant. All five plants contained chromium, some in levels of up to eleven times government limits. In addition, cadmium was found at two plants, including Mehdiganj, and lead at one. In summary, says Roy, “two things are incontrovertible.” One: that the water draining directly out of the plant contains heavy metals. And two: that contamination in the groundwater decreases as one gets farther away from the plants.

  So what about the wastewater treatment plant that Ranjan so proudly showed off at the Mehdiganj plant? Roy takes one look at the data showing limits on pH, dissolved solids, and oxygen demand, and immediately says that Coke is tracking the wrong numbers. That data, he says, will tell you only if the water is potable, not that it is free from chemical contamination. None of the aeration or filtering that Hindustan Coke does will remove heavy metals, he says, which need to be percolated out using salts. Not only is that process expensive, but then you are left with hazardous solid waste that needs to be disposed of. The bioassay with the two fish, he adds, is completely laughable, completely failing the scientific protocol for such a test. “To do this bioassay, you need to have six tanks with different concentrations in the water, with twenty fish in each tank,” he says. “So you’d need 120 fish in all.”

  Increasingly armed with countrywide data, the various campaigns against Coca-Cola began coordinating their activities. Ajayan and Nandlal met for the first time in January 2004, along with Srivastava and other international activists, at the World Social Forum, an annual progressive strategy session-cum-spring break for lefties that coincides with the meeting of the world’s political and financial masters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Held in Mumbai, the forum featured a march of some five hundred people to protest Coke, led by Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar; SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa was marching right alongside.