How Coca-Cola is reducing its water consumption
March 2, 2010 | Length: 00:02:02
With over 900 bottling operations globally, how does Coca-Cola keep its water consumption in check? Jeff Seabright, vice president of the Environment for Coca-Cola, talks about how they're using new water filtering and recovery technologies to bring the company's water use down.
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Transcript
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>> What does Coca Cola look at? What's of interest? What are the priorities when it comes to water when you think about all the supply whether it's sugar or other things? What are opportunities out there that you're searching for?
>> Yeah, there's actually a lot of opportunities if you look at Coca Cola as a system. You know, we're the world's largest beverage company, and we have over 900 bottling operations globally, and those operations are located in individual local communities. We also have over twenty million access points. That's vending machines, points of sale with coolers, and we also have the world's largest juice business, and if you look at juice, that's all agricultural based which is a heavy user of water. So, you know, we're trying to grow our business. We're trying to double it, and our bottling operations use more than one liter of water to produce one liter of product, and so what we're trying to do is actually get that water use ratio down so we're heavily looking for new technologies that help us filter and recover water, to reclaim it so that we don't discharge it from the plant, and then when we do discharge water from the plant, that that water is clean. So, I mean, we have a high need to actually, you know, reuse and be extremely efficient with the water, because especially a lot of places where our plants are located, they're water stressed. The other thing is, you know, sustainable agriculture. You know, right now there's a lot of places that still use flood irrigation. We're trying to promote new technology that will help, for example, drip irrigation to allow more efficient use of water within our supply chain for sugar cane and also for things like oranges and everything else. So, you know, across the spectrum, there's a lot of touch points where we want to actually save, not just water, but also energy. All of our vending machines... You've got compressor pumps. You've got refrigeration units, you've got lighting, and we're trying to reduce the energy requirement of the entire footprint of the company.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====