Two well being consultants on Tuesday known as for Olympic organisers to chop ties with main sponsor Coca-Cola, saying the present massive cash sponsorship deal permits the US firm to “sportswash” unhealthy sugary drinks.
In the meantime the Paris Olympics organising committee mentioned on Tuesday it might meet its goal to scale back single-use plastics by half in comparison with the 2012 London Video games, regardless of plastic bottles by Coca-Cola being broadly used on its websites.
Occasions on the Paris Video games have been lined with promoting for the ever-present fizzy drinks of Coca-Cola, which has been sponsoring the Olympics since 1928.
However these sugary drinks “provide little or no dietary worth” and selling such unhealthy merchandise has no place in sport, in accordance with Trish Cotter and Sandra Mullin of world well being group Important Methods.
Sugary drinks are a “key driver” of a variety of significant well being issues affecting folks the world over, together with weight problems, diabetes, hypertension and coronary heart illness, the pair wrote in a commentary within the journal BMJ International Well being.
Coca-Cola’s merchandise additionally contribute to international plastic air pollution, greenhouse gasoline emissions and burn up an enormous quantity of water, they added.
“By persevering with its affiliation with Coca-Cola, the Olympic motion dangers being complicit in intensifying a worldwide epidemic of poor diet, environmental degradation and local weather change,” the authors wrote.
“It’s time for the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) to chop ties with Coca-Cola within the curiosity of athletes, spectators and the planet.”
Coca-Cola didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Olympic employees have additionally been seen emptying plastic bottles into reusable cups — a observe some say runs counter to the Video games’ pledge to be the greenest in historical past.
The Coca-Cola Firm in Could mentioned practically 10 out of 18 million refreshments — “greater than half” of all these served to spectators — could be “with out single-use plastic”.
However the Atlanta-based big mentioned it has had to make use of plastics attributable to “technical and logistical constraints”, regardless of Paris banning spectators from bringing single-use containers to Olympics websites.
On the web site for the swimming occasions for instance, glass bottles have been being emptied into red-and-white cups, as famous by one AFP journalist.
Whereas 700 drink fountains have been deployed throughout the competitors, plastic bottles are getting used the place glass options aren’t an possibility, mentioned Georgina Grenon, the pinnacle of sustainability for the Paris Video games.
In a press launch on Friday Coca-Cola mentioned it wanted to adapt to every location and discover the “greatest situations for security and meals high quality”, given technical and logistical constraints together with water and electrical energy provides, and cupboard space.
However this 12 months’s Paris Video games ought to nonetheless slash plastics use in comparison with the 2012 London Video games, in accordance with the organising committee.
“In our estimations of what is going to be served… we imagine we are going to attain this 50 % plastic single-use plastic discount,” mentioned Grenon.
The bottles poured into cups wouldn’t rely in the direction of this goal, she added.
Environmental safety charity France Nature Setting (FNE) slammed the agency for “unjustified plastic air pollution”, including on Friday that the US firm deserved the “gold medal for greenwashing” in the course of the Olympics.
In 2020, Coca-Cola signed a joint deal price a reported $3 billion to increase its sponsorship of the Olympics.
The partnership will final till not less than 2032.
In 2022, the newest information out there, Coca-Cola, which is without doubt one of the world’s high plastics producers, manufactured 134 billion plastic bottles.
The beverage big has set a goal for all its bottles to be constructed from totally recycled plastic by 2030.
Of these presently filling garbage bins on the Paris Video games, Coca-Cola mentioned round 6.2 million could be from this kind, referred to as PET plastic.
Cotter and Mullin of Important Methods famous that final 12 months Coca-Cola had extra sports activities sponsorships than some other model, together with sportswear corporations equivalent to Nike.
“This technique culminates in a gold medal alternative to ‘sportswash’ an unhealthy product,” they wrote.
The World Well being Group has known as for nations to tax sugar-sweetened drinks.
A petition launched forward of the Video games known as “Kick Massive Soda Out of Sport” has greater than 109,000 signatures, and been backed by a variety of public well being organisations together with the World Weight problems Federation.