SPONSORED
The global conversation about plastic pollution- and calls for urgent, collaborative action-are intensifying. In South Africa, Coca-Cola continues to make progress on our ambitious sustainable packaging initiative, despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Coca-Cola's World Without Waste strategy is an ambitious sustainable packaging initiative that aims to collect or recycle a bottle or can for each one the company sells by 2030, and make 100% of their packaging recyclable by 2025. As part of this vision, through their product innovations they have committed to use at least 50% recycled material in their packaging by 2030.
*Part 1: Capturing the value in packaging waste
To achieve these goals, the company is focusing on creating closed loop systems that can extract the maximum value from materials and products while in use and recovering, reusing, or recycling them after they have been used.
Collecting for a sustainable future
Coca-Cola is an active member of the PET Recycling Company (PETCO). In the last reporting period, through initiatives supported by PETCO, 55% of post-consumer beverage PET bottles were collected for recycling, despite disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Coca-Cola approved a R3-million grant and partnered with PETCO to support the national network of over 100 buy-back centres. The cash flow injection, which was deployed in 2021, ensured that they could open their doors when the economy reopened.
Importantly, the company's support of the recycling sector supports income generating opportunities for more than 60 000 waste reclaimers as well as small buy-back centres, especially in the township economy.
To further empower waste reclaimers, Coca-Cola partnered with BanQu in early 2021 to introduce an innovative payment platform to enable cashless transactions, help reclaimers to develop a financial record and assist buy-back centres with automated recording and tracking of transactions. This project will be significantly scaled up in the coming months, through PETCO.
Partnerships drive the way forward
In partnership with PETCO, and in line with Coca-Cola's World Without Waste strategy, our bottling partner, Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa (CCBSA), has partnered with Matongoni Recycling to increase the collection of PET bottles, and is ready to support collectors in Polokwane, Makhado, Messina, Venda, Tzaneen, Lebowakgomo, Thabazimbi and Lephalale.
CCBSA will embark on the following:
- Creation of new collection capacity by empowering grassroot level entrepreneurs, who have potential to collect high PET volumes.
- Increasing collection in existing urban and rural areas by supporting informal and formal SMMEs.
To enable the success of this approach, Coca-Cola has invested in the following:
- Collection subsidy - To robustly increase collection in the rural areas, we need to make collection of waste appealing in order to drive the demand.
- Transport subsidy - We know that transportation of material from rural areas to the recyclers is costly and has become a hindrance for recyclers to obtain the required feedstock. As the company increases collection in rural areas, it must ensure that the feedstock gets to the recyclers by investing in a transport subsidy via reverse logistics and third-party logistics companies in areas that are out of radius for the company's trucks.
- Equipment support - Setting up informal and formal new collectors with high PET collection potential.
Partnerships across business, government and civil society are fundamental to scaling solutions and critical to reaching our collective climate target and achieving a circular economy.
Coca-Cola works with policymakers and industry partners to advocate for effective Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems. These systems will provide an efficient, financially sustainable collection programme for all recyclable materials to ensure we can collect more bottles and cans for recycling and reuse.
Coca-Cola's bottlers, CCBSA and Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages (CCPB) host ambitious community initiatives and clean-ups every year and work with other organisations to keep our waterways clean, underpinning Coca-Cola's commitment to collective action to address packaging waste.
Read more about Coca-Cola's World Without Waste here: https://www.coca-cola.co.za/sustainability/world-without-waste
