Coca-Cola

We are immensely proud that Coca-Cola Great Britain produces the UK’s most popular soft drink and refreshes consumers daily with a whole range of other quality drinks including ‘Oasis’, ‘Powerade’, ‘Schweppes’ and ‘Minute Maid’ juice. As a result we are one of the UK’s biggest users of packaging and we clearly recognise the environmental responsibilities which go along with that fact.

We want to ensure that we not only meet our own ambitious targets to reduce packaging, energy and water use, but also inspire our consumers to recycle more, helping to make recycling everyday behaviour for all of us that can help tackle climate change in a simple way.

Over 95% of the waste from our own factories and offices is now recycled or recovered, but currently only around 25% of plastic bottles and 48% of cans are recycled in the UK. We want to make it easier for consumers to recycle more and are working in partnership with organisations such as WRAP to increase recycling levels.

We’re putting the clear ‘Recycle Now’ logo on all our packaging this year giving people billions of opportunities to see this well-known recycling logo to remind them what to do with their drinks once they’re finished. This year we’re also launching ‘Coca-Cola’ Recycling Zones around the country to help people recycle their soft drinks packaging when they’re out and about on-the-go.

All our cans, glass and plastic bottles can be recycled and over the years we’ve made them considerably lighter saving both raw materials and energy in production: our glass bottles now use 20% less glass, yet still retain the famous ‘Coca-Cola’ contour shape.

Our new fridges are now HFC-free and we’re dedicated to recycling and reusing as many of our old fridges and vending machines as possible. We’re fitting special energy saving devices to all fridges which has saved around 28,000 tonnes of CO2 to date.

We’ve cut our water use ratio by 21% since 2001 and plan to cut it a further 20% by 2020.

This year we’re working with the Carbon Trust to measure and verify the carbon footprint of individual ‘Coca-Cola’ products sold in Great Britain which will help us identify new ways of working to cut our business’s carbon footprint.

We don’t claim to have all the answers, or to have yet done enough, but sustainability and responsibility is at the heart of everything we do.

For more information, please visit http://www.cokecorporateresponsibility.co.uk/environment/