Coca-Cola, WWF work for sustainability

These goals, which complement other Coca-Cola well-being and community commitments, focus on sustainable management of water, energy, and packaging as well as sustainable sourcing of agricultural ingredients until 2020.

Coca-Cola and WWF - whch have been in partnership for almost 10 years - have agreed to extend their efforts by meeting new conservation and performance targets, promoting the integration of nature's value into decision-making processes and convening influential partners to help solve shared global environmental challenges.

"At Coca-Cola, we are deeply committed to working with partners to address our collective environmental challenges and responsibly manage the planet's resources," said Muhtar Kent, chairman and chief executive Coca-Cola.

"As we face a resource-stressed world with growing global demands on food and water, we must seek solutions
that drive mutual benefit for business, communities and nature. Working with WWF will continue to challenge our company to advance our sustainability programs and WWF's expertise in this will be instrumental in reaching our environmental performance goals, some of which they help us set," Kent said.

"We are seeing unprecedented demands on natural resources around the world. Continuing along the lines of business-as-usual puts everything at risk, including the viability of business," said Carter Roberts, president and chief executive of the WWF.

"These problems can only be solved by working together, and our work with Coca-Cola has proven that collaboration can amplify and accelerate the impact we need," he said.

Expanded partnership

Under the renewed and expanded partnership, Coca-Cola and WWF jointly developed new 2020 environmental sustainability goals for Coca-Cola and its bottling partners in 200 countries. These goals include:

• Coca-Cola will improve its water use efficiency. This target complements the 21.4% improvement in water use efficiency achieved between 2004 and 2012;
• Coca-Cola and WWF will expand their joint conservation efforts to 11 key regions across five continents, including river basins of the Amazon, Koshi, Mekong, Rio Grande/Bravo, Yangtze and Zambezi; the catchments of the Great Barrier Reef and Mesoamerican Reef; and key regions in the Amur-Heilong, Atlantic Forests and Northern Great Plains;
• Coca-Cola will work to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, making comprehensive carbon footprint reductions in manufacturing, packaging, deliveries, refrigeration and ingredients;
• Coca-Cola will work with WWF to assess the environmental and social performance of plant-based materials for potential use in its PlantBottle™ packaging. This will enable it use up to 30% plant-based material for all its plastic bottles by 2020;

• Coca-Cola will work to sustainably source key ingredients, including sugarcane, sugar beet, corn, tea, coffee, palm oil, soy, pulp and paper fibre, and orange. Coca-Cola will work with the WWF to implement its sustainable agriculture principles.

In addition, Coca-Cola is also working to buy lemon, grape, apple and mango from sustainable sources.

In addition to the goals jointly developed and announced with WWF, Coca-Cola says it will:

• Return treated water from its manufacturing processes to the environment at a level that supports aquatic life and replenish the water used in its finished beverage products through continuing its community water projects with partners in more than 100 countries. To date, Coca-Cola's replenishment work has balanced an estimated 52% of product volume through 468 projects;

• Work with the beverage industry and local organisations to establish baseline information and increase recovery and recycling in developing markets. The company will continue to reduce the amount of material and energy used in its packaging as well as continue to use both recycled and renewable content.

Since 2007, Coca-Cola and the WWF have worked together to conserve and protect freshwater resources around the world while helping to improve the efficiency of the beverage producer's global operations.

To date, the partnership has led to major conservation gains, including helping to improve the ecological health of seven of the world's most important freshwater basins across five continents, improve the Coca-Cola's water efficiency by 20% by preventing 5m tons of CO²emissions across its manufacturing operations and promoting sustainable agriculture among farmers.