By Tshidi Ramogase
At Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA), our sustainability strategy is centred around people—consumers and our employees—and driving sustainable solutions that build resilience into our business to respond to current and future challenges, while creating positive change for the planet.
Water is a priority for the Coca-Cola system because it is the first ingredient in all our beverages and is essential to the communities we serve.
The Coca-Cola Company’s 2030 Water Security Strategy focuses on increasing water security. We work with partners to provide access to a steady supply of clean water for people and ecosystems in the areas where we operate and source ingredients.
We do that by contributing toward sustainable, clean water access that improves livelihoods and wellbeing while protecting against water-related disasters.
Inside our operations, we are committed to regenerative water use. This means using less water as well as re-using and treating wastewater.
For example, in Kenya we opened a new wastewater treatment plant at our Equator Bottlers plant in Kisumu, which will promote more sustainable water use and help reduce the factory’s environmental impact. The new plant will enable us to treat and recycle wastewater generated from the production facility, which will be used for non-potable purposes such as irrigation and cleaning.
Our subsidiary, Coca-Cola Beverages Botswana, signed an agreement last year with the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources to donate water from its newly installed water treatment plant for agricultural irrigation at the campus. The new state-of-the-art water treatment plant has made the company fully effluent compliant by ensuring that clean water is returned to the environment.
For our packaging, we seek to drive a circular economy because this helps to reduce waste and carbon emissions. We’re working to use more recycled content in our packaging, to expand our use of refillable bottles, and to collect packaging for recycling through Coca-Cola’s World Without Waste initiative. We also partner to design new solutions for packaging.
As an example, Coca-Cola and other like-minded industries came together in 2004 to set up the PET Recycling Company (PETCO) in South Africa to promote and regulate the recycling of PET plastic, taking responsibility for recovering and recycling beverage PET plastic bottles.
The PETCO model has proven so effective it has been extended to three other markets, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, with plans to include additional countries like Namibia.
While we strive to make progress on our own, we are committed to fostering partnerships that drive collective impact in areas including water stewardship, packaging circularity, climate action and many more.
We engage with stakeholders, including governments, NGOs, communities, suppliers, business partners, customers and consumers in all the markets where we operate, in many forums and formats. Feedback from our stakeholders allows us to learn and improve, and informs our business and sustainability strategy.
About Author:
Tshidi Ramogase is the CCBA Chief Public Affairs, Communication and Sustainability Officer.