Reuters reported Thursday that a city government in northwest China has accused a local Coca-Cola bottling plant of falsifying pollution data.
Local police in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, temporarily detained an executive after the Lanzhou Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau found that the plant had changed its online monitoring and sampling processes to sidestep regulations, according to a statement on bureau’s website.
The plant is operated as a joint venture with Gansu COFCO Coca-Cola Beveraged Ltd., a subsidiary of COFCO, which bottles Coke products in 16 provinces through franchising agreements.
Gansu COFCO said in a statement provided by a Coca-Cola Co. spokesman in Atlanta that the problem arose from a “management oversight,” as leaders failed to notice when an employee didn’t follow procedures after seeing irregularities in the data:
Our investigation revealed that the operator on duty that day did not follow proper operating procedures after he found irregularities of unstable data in the equipment, resulting in suspension of normal operations and incorrect data. As a responsible company, we have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior. We immediately rectified the incident in accordance with the request of the relevant government department, and the monitoring equipment returned to normal operations on the same day.
The bottler said sustainability is one of its “core values “ and that it would learn from the instance and strengthen internal controls to prevent it from happening again.
Atlanta-based Coke has been a strong proponent of environmental protection and reforms in China, with a specific focus on water. Among its sustainability investments in China is the Yangtze River Partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, which with a $5 million investment from Coke has worked to protect source waters of the river’s tributaries and introduce artificial wetlands to filter wastewater from villages in western China.
A Coca-Cola spokesman declined to give a statement from the headquarters.