Towards a more sustainable environment: The case of The Coca-Cola Company
With more than 1.9 billion servings distributed each day across the world, The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage producer, with over 500 different brands of still and sparkling drinks (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Along with important actions to reduce sugar in their drinks, the company has been significantly working on reducing its impact on the environment, embedding sustainability into its corporate culture (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Failing to demonstrate a social responsibility can be critical for a company’s reputation and nowadays, companies have to make sure their production is sustainable (Sheffi. Y., 2018). Due to their enormous daily production, it is evident that The Coca-Cola Company needs to align its strategy for its viability. Even though The Coca-Cola Company has still a long way to go, their actions for the environment have been helpful and great progress has been made since their first big innovation in packaging ten years ago (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Two of the main impacts the company has chosen to focus on are plastic waste and water stewardship (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Many actions have been taken by The Coca-Cola Company to reduce these impacts and goals should be attained in the next 10 or 20 years (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). This essay will argue on the appropriateness of these actions and discuss further on possible strategies that could be implemented.
Plastic waste
One of the impact identified, which represents a significant issue for The Coca-Cola company, is plastic waste (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Manufacturing the largest number of bottle drinks all over the world has made The Coca-Cola Company the world biggest producer of plastic trash, with more than 45% of plastic pollution found in Europe being made by PepsiCo, Nestle or The Coca-Cola Company (Huong. N., 2018). However, the company stated that it was sharing Greenpeace goal to eliminate waste (Geller. M., 2018) and, as part of its plan “World without waste”, wants to help the packaging problem to be an issue of the past (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). The plastic, really useful in our economy, has become indispensable of our generation, and its lightweight, durable and cheap proprieties makes it suitable for the production of a large number of goods (Derraik. J., 2002). This has made its production increasing exponentially through time (Wilcox. C., Van Sebille. E., Hardesty. B.D., 2015). However, plastic waste is fast becoming a widely recognised problem as it can take a long time to biodegrade and thus, both, takes space and pollutes the environment (EMS, 2018). Most of the plastic that has been used in the past years has been accumulating in landfills (Zheng. Y., Yanful. E., Bassi. A.S, 2008) or worse, in the sea. According to the UNEP, if pollution rates continue, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish in 2050, with already 8 million tons of plastic killing marine life each year (Forrest. A., 2018). This ocean pollution has become a global concern, harming significantly animal lives, plastic ingestion expected to reach 99% of seabirds in 2050 (Wilcox. C., Van Sebille. E., Hardesty. B.D., 2015).
Large companies have often been critised for their lack of actions to help reduce all the plastic waste they have been producing for many years, explaining The Coca-Cola company’s promise to try to cut all plastic waste from its operations (Forrest. A., 2018). To achieve this goal, the company has invested in technology to recycle the equivalent of every bottle or can it sells globally by 2030 (Lowe. L., 2017). Some big improvements have also already proven their engagement for the environment. In 2009, The Coca-Cola has introduced its PlantBottle, a fully recyclable beverage bottle made 30% from plants, representing already 7% of the packaging volume sold globally (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). With this innovation, licensed to other companies such as Heinz (Lowe. L, 2017), The Coca-Cola Company helped to deal with the important issue of single-use plastic (EMS, 2018). It is important to understand that the persistence of plastic lies in how they are made, some being very difficult to biodegrade or even not recyclable (Comerford. J.W., 2018). Also, it was recently realised by organisations that when it was first about cleaning the environment, the problem now needed to be tackled at source (Leonard. A., 2018). This makes The Coca-Cola Company’s initiative of a fully-recyclable bottle very appropriate. Nevertheless, I would suggest to the company that they continue to focus on the development of their PlantBottle but also implement a real recycling strategy. In fact, even though these Plant Bottles can be recycled over and over again, the bioplastic acts such as any type of plastic in the nature, and, not recycled, would only pollute more (Brown. T., 2018).
The Cola-Cola Company is right in the fact that, with the current level of recycling, no real improvements can be made and that actions have to be taken at the start of the production process. However, as only 9% of the amount of plastic waste has been recycled between 1950 and 2015 (Glienicke. A., 2018), I would recommend to The Coca-Cola Company, that they invest further in recycling. More than using only recycled materials, they should help communities to engage in the disposal of the existent plastic waste. They could, such as Adidas, start new projects to turn ocean plastic into products and use ocean plastic for their packaging (Sampainho. R., 2017). But, once again, many scientists agree that the most effective way to tackle the plastic waste issue is by improving waste management infrastructure and act before the plastic enter the ocean (Rochman. C.M., 2016). Thus, I would also suggest that they develop new strategies raising awareness among their customers, ensuring that most of their products are directly sent to recycling places. People, if they know what is expected of them and if there is a threat, will engage more for the environment (Clarke. M.J., Maantay. J.A., 2006). Thus, a potential collaboration with government to create laws, punishing non-recycling, such as in New York City, where you can be fined up to up to 10,00$ per day after multiple violations (Clarke. M.J., Maantay. J.A., 2006), could be a solution.
Water stewardship
Another impact that The Coca-Cola company has identified in order to achieve sustainability is water stewardship (Coca-Cola company, 2018). This represents obviously an important issue for the company, water being the main ingredient of its products, its viability depends on the abundant accessibility to this finite resource (Walsh. H., Dowding. T.J., 2012). Water is essential for the safety of communities and ecosystems it operates in (Walsh. H., Dowding. T.J., 2012). It is used both in and to produce their drinks, making The Coca-Cola Company consume about 300 billion litres of water a year (Koch. G., 2016). This water scarcity is largely affecting business operations, supply chain and if no actions are taken, it will be the consequence of higher prices, affecting the company’s future operations (Hoekstra. A.Y., 2014). With rising population, global water requirement will continue to increase in coming years, reaching 40% higher than the current supply in 2030 and it is expected that 2/3 of the world’s population will face water shortage in the next ten years (Walsh. H., Dowding. T.J., 2012). It is the role of big companies to help them (Cordray. R., 2014). As the water issue is a well-known subject nowadays, media being aware of which company contributes to water conservation or not, it is important for The Coca-Cola Company’s reputation to keep on acting for water conservation (Hoekstra. A.Y., 2014).
However, it is essential to realise that The Coca-Cola Company actions for water stewardship has been already significant in past years. In fact, the company has first worked on a water recovery system that would cut its water usage by 35% annually (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). In 2015, that they attained their water replenishing goal which consisted in giving back the equivalent amount of water it uses (Coca-Cola Company, 2018) for its operations to nature and communities through participating in projects for water sanitation and infrastructure or even reforestation (Greenpeace, 2018), and became water neutral. Even though they’ve also been trying to enhance their water efficiency (Coca-Cola Company, 2018), their biggest action remains the partnership with WWF at the beginning of 2007 (Coca-Cola Company, 2018) and their collaboration in dozens of countries to develop water quality and preserve freshwater sources (WWF, 2017). What is appropriate in The Coca-Cola Company’s action for water stewardship is that it has tried to improve both quality and quantity (World Water Council, 2017). Because 2.4 billion people already suffer from inadequate water sanitation causing diseases (WWF, 2017) and because almost 80% of water used are released in the environment without prior treatment (WWAP, 2018), water quality has to be tackled as much as water scarcity. Rivers and lakes are drying and being too polluted (WWF, 2017) and the Unesco recently reported that nearly half of the population was facing water shortage at least one month per year (WWAP, 2018). To continue on the appropriateness of The Coca-Cola Company’s initiatives, I would say however that they are not focusing enough on the real problem: agriculture. In fact, agriculture itself consumes more water than any other sources (WWF, 2017), accounting for about 70% of global water withdrawals, mainly due to inefficient irrigation techniques (WWAP, 2018). Used by The Coca-Cola Company for the extraction of its sugar, fruit, coffee, and tea (Coca-Cola Company, 2018), even though actions have already been taken, it has to be understood that it is the main source of the world water problem.
Because, among all the water consumed in agriculture, 22% comes from rivers, lakes or aquifers (Rockström. J., Kemp-Benedict. E., 2007), The Coca-Cola Company’s work with WWF is helping significantly. However, every day even more water is used for agriculture, making farming and irrigation often the most responsible when it comes to water scarcity. This explains an urgent need to develop practices to improve water use and productivity. One big step would be for large international companies such as The Coca-Cola Company to bring support to framers. In coming years, the growing concern on climate change will impact water scarcity, river levels are projected to drop and this climate change will increase unpredictable events for farmers such as a greater amount of water back to the atmosphere quickly (SIWI, 2008). In this situation, I would also recommend to The Coca-Cola Company, as another initiative for water management, to invest in technologies that would, for example, help reduce the loss of rainfall and make sure that the most efficient methods are implemented by their suppliers. A great opportunity for improvement has been seen in developing advancing irrigations systems that would increase efficiency (Evans. R.G, Sadler E.J., 2008). Several irrigation techniques, for instance, subsurface drip irrigation, could minimize the amount of water lost due to evaporation (National Research Council, 2008) and thus, contribute as a water scarcity solution.
Conclusion
Even though The Coca-Cola Company is considered to be among the biggest polluter in the world, it has already made big steps in terms of protecting the environment, compared to many of its competitors. Because the company has already made partnerships with influential organisations such as WWF and is working on a day-to-day basis to increase its sustainability, it has proved its strong engagement for the future. The Coca-Cola Company has implemented appropriate strategies to the impacts of plastic waste reduction and water stewardship it has identified. Along with their work on their PlantBottle, an important improvement can be made in supporting recycling all over the world. If this innovation is not taken further, as it is only representing 30% of their total production, this would mean that the company still produce more than 50 billion single-used bottles that will not be recycled and will only pollute even more. As the environment protection is an urgent and world-known problem, there is a need for The Coca-Cola Company to achieve its promises, first to protect its reputation but mainly for its general viability.