Coca-Cola European Partners Unveils Sustainable Packaging Strategy

Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) has unveiled its new Great Britain sustainable packaging strategy—setting out an ambition for its GB business unit to work with local and national partners to recover all its packaging so that more is recycled and none ends up as litter.

At present, only 70 percent of the cans and 57 percent of the plastic bottles used each year are recycled, Through its new GB sustainable packaging strategy, CCEP is setting out actions it will take to improve the recovery and recycling of drinks packaging, and to reduce littering in Great Britain.

The new strategy is focused on three key areas:

CCEP has a track record of lightweighting, ensuring all its cans and bottles are 100 percent recyclable, and using recycled materials. It now wants to build on its work, with plans to double the amount of recycled plastic in every one of its PET bottles over the next three years—from the current average of 25 percent to 50 percent by 2020. To achieve this target it will continue its long term partnership with Clean Tech, which operates an advanced plastic bottle reprocessing facility in Lincolnshire, U.K.

As part of the new strategy, Coca-Cola will launch a communications campaign designed to inspire more people to recycle. At the heart of the campaign is an advert called Love Story, which will break on TV at the end of July and run across TV, cinema and digital channels. The advert features two love struck plastic bottles who are parted and then reunited as they are disposed of properly, recovered and then recycled into new bottles. The campaign will reach 35 million Britons by the end of this year. The company will also be putting a new recycling message on bottles this year and promoting recycling to six million people at festivals and events.

The company will continue to work in partnership with others—including the Governments of Great Britain—to improve the current packaging recycling system. To support the growth of the circular economy in Great Britain, the company will champion well-designed new interventions that have the potential to increase packaging collection and recycling rates, including stronger recycling targets, deposit return schemes and extended producer responsibility.

In addition, as part of its commitment to support DEFRA’s new working group on voluntary and economic incentives to reduce littering, CCEP will seek to advance its own knowledge of how consumers are motivate by an incentive-based scheme by testing an on-the-go bottle collection and reward program. This test will examine the behavioral impact of reward schemes and help inform any future national approaches to reducing litter and increasing collection and recycling rates. More details on these trials will be announced later this year.

“We have long been committed to reducing the environmental impact of our packaging,” Leendert den Hollander, vice president and general manager at Coca-Cola European Partners GB said in a statement. “We have ensured that all our bottles and cans are 100 percent recyclable; we have reduced the weight of our packs as much as possible; and have a long-standing commitment to use locally-sourced rPET and other recycled materials in our packaging.