Olympic sponsor Coca-Cola under scrutiny for widespread plastic use

Coca-Cola has exclusive rights to sell drinks at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. [Getty Images]

The Paris Olympics organising committee said Tuesday it would meet its target to reduce single-use plastics by half compared to the 2012 London Games despite bottles by major sponsor Coca-Cola being widely used on its sites.

Fanta, Sprite and Coke are flowing unabated at Olympic venues, where staff have been seen emptying plastic bottles into reusable cups -- a practice some say runs counter to the Games' pledge to be the greenest in history.

The Coca-Cola Company in May said nearly 10 out of 18 million refreshments -- "more than half" of all those served to spectators -- would be "without single-use plastic".

But the Atlanta-based giant said it has had to use plastics due to "technical and logistical constraints", despite Paris banning spectators from bringing single-use containers to Olympics sites.

At the site for the swimming events for example, glass bottles were being emptied into red-and-white cups, as noted by one AFP journalist.

While 700 drink fountains have been deployed across the competition, plastic bottles are being used where glass alternatives aren't an option, said Georgina Grenon, the head of sustainability for the Paris Games.

In a press release on Friday Coca-Cola said it needed to adapt to each location and find the "best conditions for safety and food quality", given technical and logistical constraints including water and electricity supplies, and storage space.

But this year's Paris Games should still slash plastic use compared to the 2012 London Games, according to the organising committee.

"In our estimations of what will be served... we believe we will attain this 50 per cent plastic single-use plastic reduction," said Grenon.

The bottles poured into cups would not count towards this target, she added.

Environmental protection charity France Nature Environment (FNE) slammed the firm for "unjustified plastic pollution", adding on Friday that the US company deserved the "gold medal for greenwashing" during the Olympics.

In 2022, the most recent data available, Coca-Cola, which is one of the world's top plastics producers, manufactured 134 billion plastic bottles.

The beverage giant has set a target for all its bottles to be made from fully recycled plastic by 2030.

Of those currently filling rubbish bins at the Paris Games, Coca-Cola said around 6.2 million would be from this form, known as PET plastic.