Joe Franses of Coca-Cola European Partners chats to Tim Sykes about the different approaches the iconic brand is taking to eliminate packaging waste and reduce environmental footprints.
COCA-COLA TALKS SUSTAINABILITY TS: Tell us a bit about your role – what are your key responsibilities? JF: A couple of words about Coca-Cola European Partners first of all. We are the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler by revenue – we operate across 30 markets in western and northern Europe and employ 24,000 people across our business. We manufacture products for about 300 million consumers across our markets and also serve about a million outlets. My role is to ensure that our sustainability strategy is headed in the right direction. We work very closely with the Coca-Cola Company in western Europe and we have a joint sustainability action plan called ‘This Is Forward’, which includes targets on water, calorie reduction, science-based carbon reduction and packaging. TS: Let’s home in on your sustainability targets in relation to packaging – can you explain the Coca-Cola Company’s key goals and how they relate to Coca-Cola European Partners’ own strategies and targets?
JF: The good news is that the Coca-Cola Company’s global ‘World Without Waste’ strategy is very closely aligned to our own. And, when you look at the targets, we are focusing on design, recyclability, collection and using recycled content. So, we’re really looking at a very close alignment between the global Coca-Cola strategy and our strategy in western Europe. I think there are some differences, one of these is that we have a slightly more aggressive timeline in western Europe. For example, we want to ensure
that 50% of the plastic we use will be recycled plastic. We said we were going to do this by 2025, but we’ve actually just brought this forward to 2023. The target is slightly longer at a global level – 2030.
TS: Several packaging-related announcements from Coca-Cola have caught our attention in recent times, and these shed some light on how the targets you’re talking about are actually being pursued in real terms. Can you tell us about KeelClip, the paper-based aggregator for multipacks?
JF: For context, one of the things we said we’d do earlier in the year was publish our packaging footprint. We’ve done this – it can be found on our website. This report shows that we put 23 billion packs onto the marketplace each year, four billion of which are actually refillable bottles – both glass and a small amount of refillable PET. We reckon that about a third of all the packs we put onto the marketplace are single-use plastic bottles. We also have cans, glass bottles, and refillable glass bottles, as well as 2.2 billion 500ml servings-worth of product dispensed through fountains and dispenser equipment. All of this means that our packaging footprint is quite varied. Now, when you look across that packaging footprint, we’ve said that we’re willing to ensure that everything we put on to the marketplace is recyclable. At the moment, we believe that about 98% of our primary packaging is recyclable – there’s a small number of packs that are not. By the way, when I talk about recyclability, I’m not just talking about technical Packaging Europe | 41 |
