The Coca‑Cola Company recently updated its voluntary environmental goals with a focus on reducing packaging waste, improving water security, and decreasing emissions.
In packaging, the company aims to use 35% to 40% recycled material in primary packaging (plastic, glass, and aluminum), including increasing recycled plastic use to 30% to 35% globally. It will also help ensure the collection of 70% to 75% of the equivalent number of bottles and cans introduced into the market annually.
The new sustainable packaging goals replace the previous goals established in 2022 which, according to Food Business News, aimed to make 100% of its packaging recyclable globally by 2025 and to use at least 50% recycled material in packaging by 2030. The updated goals also extend the timeframe to 2035.
According to Coca-Cola, this evolution is informed by learnings gathered through decades of work in sustainability, periodic assessment of progress, and identified challenges. Acheiving this will require continued investments in innovation and infrastructure solutions, enabling legislation, and further collaboration with bottling partners, industry peers, local governments and civil society.
“We remain committed to building long-term business resilience and earning our social license to operate through our evolved voluntary environmental goals,” said Bea Perez, executive vice president and global chief communications, sustainability & strategic partnerships officer at The Coca‑Cola Company. “These challenges are complex and require us to drive more effective and efficient resource allocation and work collaboratively with partners to deliver lasting positive impact.”
Packaging
The company offers beverages in a variety of packaging formats, including glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and refillable packaging. Each option can play a role in helping reduce packaging waste and emissions. The company is focusing its efforts to use more recycled material in primary packaging and supporting collection rates, both of which require enabling policies and the growth of collection infrastructure. The company intends to continue to invest in refillable packaging where infrastructure already exists.
The Coca‑Cola system will focus on measurable and interconnected actions under two pillars: Design and Partner to Collect.
Design
- The company is focused on ensuring that its primary packaging is recyclable. Almost all (more than 95%) of the company’s primary consumer packaging is designed to be recycled, and it is working to resolve the remaining packages.
- The use of recycled content in primary packaging can help reduce the company’s emissions. This effort, combined with innovations such as lightweighting, can avoid the additional use of virgin plastic. Costs, quality and scaling innovation are dynamic external factors that will affect implementation.
Partner to Collect
- The collection and recycling of beverage packaging remains challenging, as every state and country has unique systems, infrastructure, regulatory environments and sets of consumer behaviors. Collective action is needed to support packaging collection infrastructure and policies. The company will continue to focus on increased advocacy for well-designed collection systems, as these are often the most efficient ways to improve packaging collection rates.
- If the company reaches its 70% to 75% collection rate ambition, it intends to continue working to further increase collection over the long term. The company also intends to invest to expand the use of refillable packaging in markets where infrastructure is in place to support this important part of the company’s portfolio.
Through collaboration with local and global partners, the company will continue to expand its design innovations, explore new collection models or improve existing ones, invest in local infrastructure and engage with policymakers.
Emissions
In addition, according to a company press release, Coca-Cola aims to reduce emissions in its own operations, including concentrate manufacturing operations and company-owned bottling partners. The company’s actions on water and packaging can also help mitigate the impacts caused by climate change. The company’s acquired businesses will be excluded from this goal, including BODYARMOR, CHI, Costa, doğadan, fairlife and innocent. The company expects to prepare these businesses for integration into its 1.5°C trajectory over time.
Achieving this ambition requires additional investments in new technologies and renewable sources and working with franchise bottling partners and suppliers to reduce their direct emissions, which are the company’s Scope 3 emissions.
Water
Water is essential to people and ecosystems and is the main ingredient in the company’s products. Because water is sourced locally, the company intends to reach 100% replenishment of water used in each of the more than 200 high-risk locations across the Coca‑Cola system. The locations, which represent almost a third of the Coca‑Cola system’s locations globally, were identified following an extensive analysis updated in 2024.
The risk profile of the Coca‑Cola system’s production facilities is expected to be reassessed within five years to help ensure investments and actions are appropriately calibrated to help improve water security where the company operates.
The company continues to focus on promoting water stewardship, increasing water use efficiency and treating and returning safe water to communities.
Ongoing Actions
While the company will no longer have a voluntary goal on agriculture, it seeks to continue initiatives and programs with suppliers and third-party stakeholders to support sustainable sourcing of agricultural ingredients. These actions are intended to reduce water use and emissions to help prevent deforestation and conserve high-risk areas in the supply chain. The company also recognizes the importance of continuing and expanding efforts and partnering with stakeholders to better the lives of those who grow and harvest ingredients included in beverages and packaging.
The company expects to continue to report on its sustainability progress annually. It also intends to evaluate its actions, market dynamics, additional learnings and stakeholder needs regularly to maintain close alignment of 2035 goals with business priorities and the company’s progress.
“We know we will have more chapters in our journey and that we can’t do it alone,” Perez said in a statement. “Continued collaboration, targeted investments, and well-designed policies are crucial to help create shared value for all.”
