Tejal Somvanshi
Los Angeles County sued beverage manufacturers PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, accusing them of polluting the most populous county in the United States with plastic bottles and deceiving the public about the environmental impact and recyclability of their packaging.
The county, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, said the companies were contributing to plastic pollution with their single-use plastic bottles and were engaging in a campaign to deceive consumers into believing they were recyclable. According to the lawsuit from the Democrat-governed county, the companies did this despite knowing that the plastic from their bottles cannot be recycled on a scale significant enough to offset the environmental damage from the packaging, most of which ends up in landfills or as litter. The county maintains that the plastic pollution attributed to products manufactured by the companies constitutes a public nuisance that they must be forced to remedy.
The two companies have been ranked as the world’s top plastic polluters for five consecutive years; Coca-Cola has held the top spot for six years, according to Break Free From Plastic. PepsiCo produces approximately 2.5 million metric tons of plastic and Coca-Cola produces approximately 3.224 million metric tons of plastic annually.
The lawsuit alleges that both companies promised to create a “circular economy” for their bottles, where plastic bottles can be recycled and reused an infinite number of times, but, in reality, they can only be recycled once, if they can be recycled at all.
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The American Beverage Association, of which PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are members, denied the lawsuit’s accusations. “The allegation that our packaging is not and will not be recycled is simply not true,” said group spokesman William Dermody in a statement. Dermody said that California had a 71% bottle recycling rate in 2023, one of the highest in the country, and that their bottles are “designed to be recycled and remade and can include up to 100% recycled plastic.”
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, more than 400 million tons of plastic waste are produced worldwide each year, of which less than 10% is recycled, choking landfills and stripping the oceans. In 2022 alone, an estimated 121,324 to 179,656 tons of plastic waste leaked into land and ocean in California, and plastics constitute seven of the top 10 trash items found on beaches. According to the new lawsuit, plastic accounted for 246,124 tons of all waste materials produced by Los Angeles County residences in 2024 and 628,211 tons of all commercial waste from the community.
“I am very scared and angry about the plastic I am forced to interact with every day,” said Emily Parker, a Los Angeles County resident and coastal and marine scientist at the non-profit organization Heal the Bay. “It’s not possible to live and function without coming into contact with plastic,” she added.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop the companies’ “unfair and deceptive business practices,” as well as restitution for consumers and civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation. This case joins other similar legal actions, including a lawsuit filed by New York state last November regarding PepsiCo’s role in polluting the Buffalo River, and in August, a Washington D.C. appeals court revived a 2020 lawsuit filed by environmental group Earth Island Institute against Coca-Cola.
