Coca Cola's UK Packaging Update

27 July 2018


A year on from launching a dedicated Sustainable Packaging Strategy for Great Britain, Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) and Coca-Cola Great Britain (CCGB) now reinforce these commitments by sharing some progress highlights and revealing their vision for a well-designed Deposit Return Scheme.

1. We will continue to innovate to ensure our packaging is as sustainable as possible

  • All large PET bottles, including Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta, will start to move to 40% rPET this year – a key development to transitioning the whole PET portfolio to 50% rPET.
  • A founding member of WRAP’s UK Plastics Pact, a collaborative industry initiative supporting the circular economy.
  • A signatory for Operation Clean Sweep - taking actions to prevent plastic nurdles entering the environment, and national sponsor of Keep Britain Tidy’s Great British Spring Clean 2018, the nation’s biggest ever single clean-up event.

2. We will use our brands to encourage consumers to recycle

  • We are replacing the branding on our bottle closures with messages encouraging consumers to recycle. The closures are already on Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero sugar 500ml bottles and will appear across the rest of the Coca-Cola portfolio by the end of 2018, creating over 900 million opportunities to see these new recycling messages each year.
  • The biggest-ever recycling focused multi-media advertising campaign, ‘Love Story’, reached 27 million consumers.
  • Recycling messaging included on TV and digital advertising end-frames.

3. We will champion new ways to improve the recovery and recycling of packaging

  • CCEP and CCGB have set out their vision for a well-designed Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in the UK, with 11 clearly defined principles based on detailed discussion with suppliers and customers, industry and recyclers.
  • Part of working groups with industry and government, including Defra, for discussion on key packaging policy and to help re-design the current Producer Responsibility System.

Nick Brown, Head of Sustainability at CCEP, comments: “As a business we want to keep challenging ourselves to ensure we are part of the solution on packaging, whether it is setting ourselves ambitious targets or joining key government working groups. Initiatives like our investment in bottle recycling in GB and our commitment to keep increasing recycled material in our packs are key to ensuring more packaging is collected and reprocessed. We believe we are at a crucial moment in time, with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create real change for packaging recovery systems in GB. We have been clear on our support for a well-designed Deposit Return Scheme in Great Britain for some time – however with a DRS consultation now open in Scotland and one planned for England later on this year, it is crucial that all parties come together to develop this collaboratively. This is why we’ve revealed our vision on what is required for a practical, joined up
DRS system.”

Liz Lowe, GB Sustainability Manager at Coca-Cola Great Britain, said: “Having some of the largest, most visible brands in the world presents a unique opportunity to reach and inspire a wide number of people. Over the past year we’ve redirected a significant amount of marketing investment into recycling messaging, and into making recycling as easy as possible with really visible on-pack messaging.”



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