Capitalist Metabolism and Policy Failure: The Case of Coca-Cola in Plachimada

By Shalom Katyal

The environment has always been a self-correcting mechanism, existing as a stable steady-state equilibria (Davis & Nagle, 2010). Human civilizations also comprised this equilibrium, maintaining a social metabolic balance leading to a stronger equilibrium. But, we have constantly surpassed our biological constraints to develop at a rapid rate (Waring & Wood, 2021). In this boom came the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism. This stretched ecosystems to their capacity, allowing unprecedented growth and the existence of MNCs that expanded to LEDCs (Merriam-Webster, 2025). One such conglomerate is Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Limited, which established its plant in Plachimada, Kerala in 2000. This plant caused heavy lead and cadmium contamination in the local water bodies and destroyed the common-pool resources maintained by locals. This eventually led to protests, resulting in the plant being shut down (Bijoy, 2006). Yet, the pollution it caused has destroyed the local metabolic balance between humans and water bodies (Bijoy, 2018). This paper studies the failure of those responsible for regulating social metabolism: environmental policymakers.

Coca-Cola entered Plachimada in 2000, and immediately started using up their water supplies, draining wells and groundwater. They extracted 1.5 million litres of water daily, dumping their remains out into local water bodies and crop fields (Bijoy, 2006). HCCB, in about four years, has ravaged all water supplies to the point where local residents depend on pipeline water to this date (Bijoy, 2018). This is the perfect example of Pineault’s point about capitalist metabolism (Pineault, 2023). The capitalists here followed the linear economy, taking as they wished from the commons and dumping their toxic remains into commons and the communities that depend on them (Sariatli, 2017). It demonstrates how capitalism veils its impacts, as all of the costs are externalized, until one comes to face the violence and exploitation that results from it. Capitalism disrupted the balance that the locals held at Plachimada, in exchanges between humans and nature, degrading the social metabolic structure.

Accepting Pineault’s theory of social metabolism requires seeing the environment as a steady-state equilibrium. The environment is at the mercy of capitalist structures today, as they can cause large disruptions to it, ones they cannot correct themselves. Hence, the onus to manage the metabolic balance lies on environmental policy, and those that dictate it: regulatory authorities. Their metabolism greatly impacts the biophysical world. Yet, we constantly see those given the greatest power to sustain the environment fail to maintain this metabolism, opening doors to companies like Coca-Cola to exploit this balance. This begs the question, why does policy fail?

Coca-Cola received a slap of a wrist for their actions. While they did have to eventually shut down their plant, they paid the locals back nothing from the recommended INR 216 Crore. The influence and wealth they hold allows them to operate in India freely today, despite it being over a decade since they were supposed to pay their amount. (Anthapuram, 2010). This is because capitalism’s destructive metabolism comes from the potential resources that are generated through the linear model. This model gives them unprecedented power over all other components in this system, through the financial wealth they generate. Capitalism’s metabolism is strong enough to disrupt the regulators of the steady-state equilibrium, where those that are meant to regulate this system end up facilitating the greater abuses committed to it. This is how environmental policy fails.

The situation in Plachimada was also a failure of information, leading to hermeneutical injustice stemming from an informational lacuna in the policymakers. It is standard procedure to conduct accurate environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to understand and mitigate the possible fallouts of these projects. This informational lacuna allowed projects like Plachimada to be approved without EIAs. It is the duty of policymakers to resolve informational lacuna. here, the locals have to bridge this lacuna, and fight against hermeneutical injustice themselves. Reaching this realization with limited access to information was a time-consuming process, worsening the impact on their populations. Showcasing the importance of implementing the frameworks from Sustaining the Commons by Andiers and Janssen (Janssen & Anderies, 2016).

The lack of an EIA shows that the decisions on social metabolism made in Plachimada by the government and HCCBL were made with economic development as a priority. The locals’ responses were a measure of their robustness to external changes. But, it highlights the lack of a coherent framework used by policymakers, which worked in the favor of HCCBL. The problem with this framework is that it should be a last resort. People abandoning their daily work to fight for reform represents a situation grave enough to forgo income to achieve this change. It is policy’s job to ensure that the robustness framework is not the primary method for response. This is another failure for policymakers.

The current system ignores groups, interests, and outcomes that are not centered around decision makers. Since their primary concern is economic growth, it creates a gap between the policymakers and the ground reality. This is the second problem with policymaking, that the interests of all key stakeholders are ignored. This is why Plachimada needed frameworks. In particular the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework addresses regulatory practices for common pool resources (Janssen & Anderies, 2016). Through IAD policymakers would be forced to confront the biophysical environment in Plachimada and Palakkad, and foresee the costs to it in industrial activities. Then they would have to consider the socioeconomic conditions of the populace and what institutional support they receive. Only after understanding each group, could they determine the consequence of each action. Frameworks like IAD are important because they are easily comprehensible to a variety of stakeholders. The lack of integration of such frameworks into mainstream policymaking has led to the disruption of a number of lives that represents the third major failure of policymaking: the informational lacuna. Until there is an accurate understanding of the interests of each actor, this lacuna will always disproportionately impact the weaker actors, benefitting the government and the capitalist metabolism while disrupting the local common pool resources and the environmental value that is tied to them.

Now that we have established a need for a defined new framework to deal with cases like Plachimada, we need to find a pathway to achieve this system. Those with power, whether economic or political, would always choose to maintain a positive feedback loop to maximize their power and disrupt social metabolism rather than maintain it. If we require a movement that benefits the environment and the local communities, the movement must be a grassroots movement. Grassroots movements are often environmentally motivated, involve causes for social justice, and are citizen led. The most important reason, though, is that we need to address two issues at a time: unwillingness to support common pool resources, and a lack of understanding about them. This movement should result in the influence of locals who handle common pool resources on policy decisions alongside policymakers and administrators, as both come together to manage the environment. This subscribes to the idea of environmental stewardship with both soft ecocentric and anthropocentric leanings. This stewardship is how we must proceed, more important than any other method. It is clear that there is already a massive impact that humans have had on the environment, and they will continue to widen their impacts. The human world, despite how differently it may be thought of as from nature, is but an extension to it. We cannot maintain a steady state metabolism simply through changing our actions, we must reverse the damage of our previous actions, and constantly monitor change for future ones. To bring us as close as possible to our original steady state equilibrium, we must consistently contribute more to nature than the damage we cause through our actions. And that is the only way we can revert back from our new equilibrium to as close enough to old ones. No system can reverse the damage humans have done, but stewardship has the potential to fix the maximum possible.

Implementing this system fully would be a mammothian task. The first step is to empower these grassroots movements. Plachimada has demonstrated itself as an example of a partially successful grassroots movement. To find out what a successful grassroots movement would look like, we must understand the biggest failure of the Plachimada movement: the lack of transfer of power. Grassroots movements bend policy will for a particular topic, yet as these movements lose steam, the system slowly reverts back into its capitalistic metabolism. Hence, there needs to be a permanent transfer of power from policymakers to those sustaining common pool resources. There must be a system that works on the mutual consent of both parties, one ensuring nationwide development, the other protecting local and environmental rights. By having a seat on the decision making table, one ensures that there are much lesser ecosystems that revert away from steady state equilibriums, much consideration before major environmental decisions, and many bridged informational lacunae that lead to a reduction in hermeneutical injustices. This system is not perfect, as it cannot correct past damages, like the ones we see in Plachimada, but it can be the first in a series of preventative measures to ensure Plachimada never repeats itself.

Shalom Katyal is currently a student at Ashoka University majoring in Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics, with a minor in Entrepreneurship and a concentration in Environmental Studies. They specialize in writing across a variety of fields: sports as cultural capital, stakeholder rights in nature, political philosophy in state formation and the protection for the freedom of expression, organizational structuring for governments, and geopolitical analysis. Widely, all of this fits into the field of public policy. They explore public policy from both the lens of academia through TAships in public policy think tanks and courses, and a corporate lens, interning with political consultancies like CPC Analytics — the most prominent one in the city of Pune.