Coca-Cola: A leader in sustainability, not just market shares

With the intense focus upon global warming and the deterioration of the environment, consumers are developing environmental consciences. Once, consumers only used to care about what benefits they personally would derive from a product– it this product a worthwhile purchase for me? Now, consumers are interested in the before and after as well – how was this product made? What happens to this product once I throw it out?

For the past several years, consumers have begun to demand that companies become more sustainable in their practices. One industry that has particularly come under fire is the bottled beverage industry, with The Coca-Cola Company attracting much of the attention. As one of the largest beverage companies in the world, Coca-Cola is practically the poster child for beverage companies in general. Coca-Cola owns more than 500 brands in 200 countries and as of 2006, owned a market share of 53 percent. The company sells more than 25 million plastic soda bottles a day. Without even bothering to do the math, you can see that that’s a lot of bottles – more than ten billion a year! These ten billion or so bottles are made out of 900 million pounds of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is a recyclable material.
In response to consumer demand and pressure from organizations the likes of As You Sow and National Recycling Coalition, Coca-Cola announced in 2007 that it was dedicated to figuring out a way to recycle or reuse 100 percent of its plastic bottles in the United States. Coca-Cola’s plan was to invest more than $60 million into recycling. Part of this investment was earmarked to build the world’s largest plastic bottle to bottle recycling plant, which was built in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 2008, and became fully operational in January 2009.

This plant was built in cooperation with the United Resource Recovery Corporation (URRC), a company that specializes in recycling PET from food and beverage containers. URRC uses a special process that takes the PET and turns it into chip resin, which can then be reused in food packaging materials. This process is FDA approved. Early estimates suggest that this plant will be able to turn out enough recycled PET each year to create two billion 20-ounce bottles.
The best part about this plant is that it doesn’t just contribute to environmental sustainability – it also has the potential money for the company, which would be a wonderful incentive for other companies to start taking interest in recycling their PET packaging and containers as well. The plant wouldn’t net a ridiculously large amount of money for Coca-Cola, but possibly enough money that it would make a difference. There is a huge demand for this type of recycling program around the United States, especially in the Midwest where recycled bottles end up in China because it’s cheaper to ship them over rather than having these bottles taken care of domestically.

PET is such a valuable recyclable material that even though the recycling plant can produce huge quantities of recycled PET, it’s not enough to meet the recycled PET demand. To meet this demand and ensure access to recycled materials, Coca-Cola formed Coca-Cola Recycling LLC (CCR) in November 2007. CCR is interested in recycling all sorts of Coca-Cola packaging materials such as PET, cardboard, plastic film and aluminum from around the country. CCR is focused on developing cost-efficient solutions for recycled containers and will also help establish more centralized recycling centers in the United States.

Jenna Pacht writes for A Beautiful Look by Jenna, which specializes in Denver electrolysis, the only FDA approved method of permanent hair removal.