Coca-Cola Details Carbon and Water Footprint Reductions

May 10, 2012

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Enterprises’ (CCE) new sustainability report outlines the company’s new vision, commitments and more challenging targets that lie ahead.

CCE has outlined 37 targets in each of its seven focus areas, but said it want to particularly lead the industry in energy and climate change and sustainable packaging and recycling.

“We have made important progress in the past year to reduce our water and carbon impacts while growing our business,” said John F. Brock, chairman and CEO. “We know that taking broader accountability across our value chain is the right thing to do, and to create a more sustainable tomorrow, we will work even more closely with customers, suppliers and other partners.”

Key progress over the past year include reducing carbon emissions from the manufacture, distribution and cooling of CCE’s products by 8.4 percent while growing volume by 3.5 percent and reducing the company’s water use ratio by 13 percent since 2007.

In 2011, CCE announced a plastics recycling joint venture with ECO Plastics in Great Britain which, when operational, will enable the company to include 25 percent recycled PET in all its plastic packaging in Great Britain this year.

The following are other report highlights. The company:

Became the first soft drinks company to receive the Carbon Trust Standard Award, receiving the best-ever score out of 675 companies;
Certified three manufacturing sites to the new energy management standard, ISO 5000, with the company’s plant at Wakefield, Great Britain, becoming the first in the food and beverage industry to achieve the certification;
Invested $23 million on carbon reduction projects, such as solar panels installed on the roof of a new green distribution centre in Belgium and at three sites in Great Britain;
Was invited to join the EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change to demonstrate the support of business for the European Union to move to a low-carbon society;
Launched a ‘Carbon Challenge’, in which 129 of CCE’s suppliers were surveyed on their carbon performance and asked to implement reduction plans;
Introduced PlantBottle, incorporating plastic from plant-based material, across all territories to popular 500ml PET Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero packages.

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