In a world where reputation is determined by social media, many leading companies and multi-national corporations (MNCs) use their webpages to advertise their sustainability record. How much of this...

Coca-Cola- The truth about its “Water Sustainability” program
Executive Summary
This article discusses about the concept of ethics and sustainability which is much needed in today’s corporate world. Once we have understood the phenomenal need of following certain steps to protect our environment, we delve into the case of Coca-Cola, where we see “All that glitters is not gold”. Although they have an amazing representation of all their plans and seem to be performing a lot of balance for the earth, this article proves that they are actually not living up to their promises and the big lies are all part of their media positioning.
Introduction
The whole concept of ethical and sustainability reasoning for a company comes from the environmental degradation of our environment which is happening at a very rapid pace (Eizenberg, 2017). Based on the consequentialist theory of normative ethics, our ethical actions are determined by the consequences which they will prevail for our company (Nwadiugwu, 2015). This is mostly the case with all private sector profit driven firms act ethically only if the results do not hamper their profit making process. Ethics is a broad topic covering aspects of morals, rational thinking, empathy and respect (Gamlund, 2012). It can be further segregated into business ethics, workplace ethics, moral ethics and others. Understanding and applying ethics is an important part of running a successful business in the long run (Chan, 2010), but most corporates seldom understand that.
Apart from ethics, sustainability has become an important factor in today’s world (Goni, 2015). This is because of the rapidly degrading environment and society as too much is being used. As evident, sustainability can be divided into 3 parts- social, economic and environmental. The concept of sustainability came up when industries decided they should give back to the society at least a small part of what they are taking, so that the future is not depleted of adequate resources. Since it is practically impossible for companies to be completely sustainable in only one area, they divide their approach into all the three or two of the three segments, which helps them cover more parts of the society to help (Mehan, 2017). Although this article will talk about how companies do not exactly give back what they promise, it is remarkable how the sustainability concept has encouraged thousands of corporates to put in millions in planning and incorporating plans. In some countries like India, for companies earning profits beyond a certain limit, it is compulsory for them to spend a percentage of their profits for sustainability, which can be helpful for the innumerable number of NGOs which they have. Mostly it is easier for companies to spend on elimination of wastes, recycling water and other garbage which they have created like plastic bottles, packaging and aluminum cans. All this leads to lesser waste on earth and thus lesser burden.
Our methodology in this article has been secondary research and we have used web sources like online newspapers and articles to validate our thoughts. Our research was done on topics based on business ethics and how to follow that, the different forms of sustainability, approach and application. A paper has also been cited in the reference section...