Earlier this week, I referenced a McKinsey article about corporate social responsibility and why it needs to be really focused on areas that a company actually has a real opportunity to make an impact (“Could you be more specific? Why your corporate social responsibility plan needs structure”). Beverage giant Coca-Cola offers a great example of this philosophy in practice.
I spoke with Abby Rogers, vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola in charge of helping communicate the company’s sustainability efforts, to get a sense of how the company prioritizes. She says their efforts are prioritized around three main agendas:
- Water and water stewardship
- The environmental impact of packaging
- The impact of its beverages on public health
Pretty specific and yet relevant for a beverage company, don’t you think?
One example is PlantBottle, a packaging program that will start working its way into the company’s products in January 2010.
Rogers says the initiative is intended to help decrease dependence on non-renewable resources: each PlantBottle PET bottle contains materials from plants. Specifically sugar cane and molasses culled from the refining process. What’s more, each of them is 100 percent recyclable. The company hopes to ship up to 2 billion of the special bottles during 2010. The first generation will show up in Coke brands in Copenhagen (subtle tie-in to the climate talks) and Coke, Sprite, Fresca (yay!) and Dasani water bottles in the western United States (Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles).
This video link featuring Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent explains more about the PlantBottle manufacturing process and its impact on the company’s carbon footprint.
