The Inconsistencies Regarding Neutral Plastic Certification That Postobón Isn’t Talking About

Media released by the Ardila Lülle Organization reported the news enthusiastically and simultaneously: Agua Cristal, bottled water from Postobón, has been granted plastic-neutral certification. FM, RCN Radio and the financial daily La República joined the chorus (they all belong to the same economic group). The information benefited the image of the bottling company and the business conglomerate.

As a result of this certification, every time you buy a bottle of Agua Cristal, you’ll see a light blue rectangle containing a white leaf on a green background. The seal claims “plastic neutrality,” a concept that represents a balance between the amount of the synthetic material used by the company and the amount it manages to recycle or reuse. This is presented to the public as an attempt to offset the impact of plastic consumption through specific recovery actions. It is similar to the concept of carbon neutrality, but applies to plastic waste.

What the bottler and its media allies failed to point out was a series of facts surrounding the certification: information the company refuses to make public, advantageous compensation methods, and potential conflicts of interest. VORÁGINE investigated the process for obtaining this certification to make it transparent to the public.

The Birth of Certification

The certification grew out of a technical standard created by ICONTEC––a recognized certification company in Colombia––together with the Compromiso Empresarial por el Reciclaje Foundation (CEMPRE). The launch, brought forward to September 4, 2022, was captured on video: the camera showed a person speaking from a lectern, in front of an olive-green background. The branches of a tree moving in the wind completed the image. This staging was not fortuitous; it projected the idea of environmental responsibility.

In 2021, several media outlets such as El Tiempo, El Heraldo and Forbes Colombia reported that Nestlé had achieved plastic neutrality. Nestlé had even publicized the fact on its website and garnered public support from Carlos Eduardo Correa, Minister of the Environment during the government of Iván Duque. However, during the launching of the technical standard in 2022, it became clear that the Nestlé announcement had some gaps. Juan Farfán, Nestlé’s senior manager of regulatory affairs, said they were not “100% satisfied” with the process of achieving neutrality. The executive said they realized they needed “something a little more formal.” There was still no standard defining the requirements for making declarations of neutrality.

“We started knocking on ICONTEC’s door to ensure that this document (the standard) could become a reality today.” We asked them to create a critical mass of companies and stakeholders that would sit down and write up the standard. Naturally, with help from ICONTEC, to provide guidelines on how a technical standard should be written.” It was the companies that consume, produce, and market plastic that began to develop the standard.

Laura Reyes, executive director of CEMPRE, told VORÁGINE that the Colombian Ministry of the Environment also participated in the process of developing the standard. To corroborate this information, we asked ICONTEC how that entity had contributed, but we received no response. At the standard’s launch, Diana Alzate, the certification body’s standardization project manager, spoke of an “alliance” between that company and the foundation, with no mention of any public entity.

This fact is very relevant. Around the world, plastic-neutral certifications have been criticized by civil society organizations. DW, a German state media outlet, published a note entitled “Are plastic neutrality certificates a scam?”, in which they quoted Alix Grabowski of the NGO World Wildlife Fund, who noted: “It’s quite misleading for a company to claim its products are plastic-neutral when these plastics can still be found in nature.”

The world faces an urgent reality in the face of this material. Micro-plastics have been detected in water sources, food, human blood, newborn placentas, and in wild animals. The Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona has documented how prolonged contact with these tiny particles causes DNA damage, affects various organs and tissues, and is believed to be the cause of several diseases.

Add to this the fact that plastic production requires a large amount of natural resources. A study by the Universidad Autónoma de México showed that the production of a single plastic bottle requires 7 liters of water. Furthermore, its raw material is oil. Attempts to reduce global consumption of this material have encountered opposition from oil-producing companies and states. The El País newspaper revealed that, with the rise of electric cars, the fossil fuel industry has shifted its growth expectations to plastic consumption.      

This context of environmental and health damage has put pressure on companies that use plastic to sell their products. One thing is clear: companies had an interest in guiding the creation of the technical standard used to evaluate them. But there’s more. CEMPRE, influential in developing the standard, is a non-profit organization run by powerful corporations interested in obtaining material neutrality certifications. Its board of directors is made up of 13 companies, including Postobón, Coca-Cola, Alpina, Bavaria, and Nestlé. And the role of this corporate foundation extended beyond the construction of the standard.

Certification Application: From One Partner to Another

The material-neutrality standard in question was based on three pillars: optimization, compensation, and communication. The idea is for companies to demonstrate that they optimize and offset the same amount of raw materials they use in a process. They can be certified neutral in different materials such as glass, metal, plastic, among others.

Compensation compliance is granted through a system known as “material credits” whereby, for every ton of a material the company uses, it is required to offset one credit. Companies are supposed to demonstrate that they support projects to recycle the same amount of raw materials that they put on the market.

Economic interests come into play in the implementation of this model. The organization that granted these material credits to Agua Cristal was CEMPRE. In other words, an entity funded by a company ends up being a crucial validator of a process that benefits its board members. ICONTEC later conducted an audit.

Felipe Vásquez, head of CEMPRE’s knowledge management center, said the material credits they validated were obtained through the Red Reciclo initiative, a project led by companies such as Postobón, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé.

To find out how this works, we made attempts to contact more than five associated recycling organizations. Only one agreed to give us some information. We are not revealing their identity in order to avoid any harm to them at work. The director of the association told us that 50 of the 100 recyclers who work for them have links to Red Reciclo, explaining how the scheme works: CEMPRE sets monthly collection targets for materials: 25 kilos of Tetra Pack, 25 kilos of amber PET (dark plastic bottles), 120 kilos of glass, and 25 kilos of flexible plastic (bags). If a recycler cannot meet the goal for one component, they can compensate by collecting more kilos of another. At the end of the month, each recycler receives a 45,000-peso bonus, redeemable at supermarkets. In addition, CEMPRE provides the association with 20 million pesos annually to cover needs such as machinery, transportation, and others.

However, the director we interviewed clarified that the contract between his association and CEMPRE does not include transparent PET, the material used to bottle Agua Cristal. “They did inform me that this year they were going to focus on transparent PET, but I haven’t heard anything yet,” he said. This sheds light on one fact: the required compensation included in the technical standard allows companies to adapt the process to include plastics other than those they use in their production. This fact was confirmed by Postobón when they answered our inquiry as to what materials they compensated: “The equivalent amount of plastic materials used was offset with plastic materials, including PET, as permitted by law.”

We consulted Jonathan Sánchez, a sector and corporate specialist in climate change and biodiversity at WWF, who said: “You’re supposed to collect [the same materials that cause] the impact you’re generating. Polyethylene (PET) is among the most commonly found in humans. If that’s the one that tends to migrate most toward us humans, having a goal of collecting a different material wouldn’t make much sense.” 

According to data provided to VORÁGINE by the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, around 1.4 million tons of plastic are produced in the country each year. In 2020, 316,450 tons of beverage bottles were made from this material. In 2023, 283,531 tons of PET were recycled. It is unclear how much plastic is used by the companies that make up CEMPRE’s board of directors.

Information Not Quite So Crystal-Clear

During the launch of the technical standard, several speakers mentioned communication as a key element. “One of the very clear principles we have here is that we must keep a clear accounting of materials. “So, if that’s really what’s being done, any outsider can come in and review the numbers and corroborate that what’s being said is real and consistent with company practices,” said Nestlé’s Farfán.

We asked Jonathan Vásquez for details regarding Agua Cristal’s certification: the number of tons registered and the amount of material credits CEMPRE validated. “I have to confirm this internally, but, yes, since this is a public process, I have to communicate… The first pillar is optimization, the second is compensation, the third is communication. So there must indeed be transparency in communication. We are not responsible for that; the company certified must do it, but it should be made public,” he said.

We filed a petition with ICONTEC seeking information on Agua Cristal‘s certification that included an eight-point questionnaire, but none of our questions were answered. “We find it necessary to deny this request for [what we consider to be] confidential information, in order to safeguard the interests, prerogatives, and rights of our clients,” they argued.

We also asked Postobón about the number of credits they needed to become certified, and the company responded: “It’s a competitive and confidential figure; it can’t be given due to market competition.”

This means that only actors who make economic agreements with each other have access to the information: CEMPRE, ICONTEC, and Postobón in the case of Agua Cristal‘s plastic-neutral certification. The same company (Postobón) has also obtained another material neutrality certification for its Hatsu brand. And Nestlé obtained a neutrality certificate, which was announced on its website.

“If the seal was created without transparency, everything the company does to profit from [the seal] will come under fire as a result of this initial lack of transparency in obtaining certification,” said Jackeline Bravo Chamorro, a professor in the Master’s program in Public Health at Colombia’s Universidad del Valle and a professor of Ethics in the Master’s program in Biotechnology at Universidad ICESI.

Get the Seal, Announce It, and Omit Information

When Agua Cristal obtained its certification, Postobón published a press release in which it withheld relevant information: “The process was validated by a third party. In this case, CEMPRE, an expert and benchmark entity in circular economy, endorsed and issued the credits that support the neutralization process, which confirms the transparency and rigor of the process.” What Postobón calls a “third party” is an organization that receives money from the company and over which the company has decision-making power.

Professor Bravo said: “Clearly, CEMPRE, by having a Postobón representative on its board of directors, is tied to that company; therefore, the objectivity and independence of the process is compromised. There is a clear conflict of interest, and this creates bias in the measurement, interpretation, and communication of results,” she stated.

The organization defends its work. “At CEMPRE, there are governance models that prevent manipulation. Companies never have access to this data or processes; we are an independent entity that supports the industry,” said Laura Reyes. Jonathan Vásquez, from the same organization’s Knowledge Management Center, said, “I don’t feel there’s a conflict of interest because ultimately we don’t certify the companies as being material-neutral. That’s precisely where ICONTEC comes in, as the verifying and validating entity for this process, and they issue the certification.” He also ensured that the certifying agency audits the documents they provide to support material credits, stating that they maintain traceability with recycling associations and processors regarding the amount of plastic reintroduced into the production chain.

Postobón also defended the process. “From that perspective (the one presented by Bravo), everything would generate a conflict of interest,” the company said. “That doesn’t invalidate the exercise,” he added. He also stated that the process undergoes “double verification,” referring to an audit conducted by the National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA). But, herein lies an important nuance.

Several Birds With One Stone

VORÁGINE sent a questionnaire to the Ministry of the Environment and in its response the entity confirmed that it does not oversee the granting of certification. That is to say, the seal represents an agreement between private parties.

What Postobón was referring to when it mentioned ANLA is the process of material utilization monitored by that entity. In 2018, a resolution was issued creating what is known as the Responsabilidad Extendida del Productor (Producer’s Extended Responsibility) framework, within which figures regarding use must be reported to the entity, which, in that process, conducts an audit. The mandatory goal is for bottling and packaging companies to use 18% of the packaging they put on the market in 2025.

So, although CEMPRE and Postobón mentioned that ANLA performs an audit, it has nothing to do with the plastic-neutral certificate. What this proves is that there are companies that use a portion of what they legally report to the entity in order to conduct marketing campaigns with seals that give them commercial advantages. In fact, Red Reciclo itself was created after several companies got together to fulfill the Producer’s Extended Responsibility requirements.

Neutrality as an Obligation

The issue of neutrality certificates is before Congress. Representative Katherine Miranda of the Partido Verde introduced a bill in 2022 to regulate them. “It sought to ensure that these certifications were in the hands of the Ministry of the Environment and not ICONTEC, as is currently the case. If Colombia doesn’t move forward with robust and demanding regulations, companies will continue to take advantage of certification systems with no real impact,” she said in an interview with VORÁGINE. “Here, too, consumers are being misled, and the focus is being diverted from the structural problem,” she concluded.

Miranda’s bill established plastic neutrality as an obligation for companies: three years after the law’s approval, companies would be required to prove that they collected, recycled, and transformed at least 70% of the plastic they put on the market. The representative told this media outlet that after presenting the bill she was contacted by people from the National Association of Industrialists (ANDI), an organization that represents the interests of large companies. Miranda regrets the bill’s demise, as it was never even scheduled for discussion in the House.

In 2019, the ANDI announced the creation, together with ICONTEC, of a technical standard for the “self-regulation” of the sugary drinks industry. This occurred while Congress was debating two initiatives that the industry’s union opposed: front-of-package warning labels and health taxes (which taxed sweetened products). The ANDI’s Cámara de la Industria de las Bebidas (Beverage Industry Chamber) shares several members with CEMPRE: Postobón, Coca Cola, and Bavaria. Industry lobbyists had been using “self-regulation” as an argument for months to claim that laws regulating these issues were supposedly unnecessary.

Postobón and CEMPRE defend ICONTEC’s material neutrality certification as a “step in the right direction” for companies. They also emphasize that undergoing the certification process is voluntary. Reyes at CEMPRE acknowledged that they could have been more precise with the terms included in the technical standard: “We believe that perhaps the term neutrality is not the most appropriate; it should have been called circularity.”Pollution continues to increase. Researchers from the Universidad Javeriana found traces of micro-plastics in honeybees. It remains to be seen whether stricter regulations will be imposed so that certification processes cease to be a private matter and can begin to be monitored by the public. For now, the only news about the seals comes when companies celebrate achieving it, and the seal itself, when it appears on their bottles. 

See also: 122 Visits to Congress: How the Postobón Lobbyist Opposed the “Healthy Taxes”

* This investigation was funded, in part, by Vital Strategies. The content is editorially independent and is intended to shine a light on illegal or unethical practices in the food and beverage industry and on the fact that it is the most vulnerable populations who disproportionately bear the brunt of the health crisis caused by the consumption of unhealthy food and beverages. Unless otherwise noted, all statements published in this story, including those regarding specific legislation, reflect the views of specific organizations, and not of Vital Strategies.

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