Philobiblon

Slowly, far too slowly, the multinationals are being forced to notice environmental campaigns. The Independent reports:

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which between them account for 55 per cent of the global soft drinks and mineral water market, have vowed to overhaul their operations to recover and recycle the billions of plastic containers used to sell their products worldwide…
Coca-Cola announced last week that it intended to recycle all its plastic bottles in the US within five years. A £30m recycling plant will be built in South Carolina with a capacity to handle two billion bottles a year with similar facilities planned for Austria, Mexico and the Philippines.

You might think I’d say “good”, but I won’t. Recycling was a simple first step that got people involved in “going green”, but once you build that £30m plant there’ll be enormous pressure to run it at full capacity. Instead, much better would be to first reduce the number of bottles used (promotion of good ol’ tap water would be a good start), and then resuse bottles, rather than recycling them. And the only way that latter is going to happen is by governments showing just a tinsy bit of courage.