Most consumer goods depend on some form of packaging for transportation, display and shopper convenience. In food and drink products, packaging also provides safety benefits, such as being tamper resistant, reducing spoilage and providing information for consumers. Reducing waste and the consumption of natural resources is an important issue for us and we are committed to reducing and optimising our packaging as a core business strategy.
The Coca-Cola Company is making significant progress in reducing the amount of material used in our packaging via light weighting trials, and in using material with recycled content wherever possible.
Kerbside recovery has led to significant environmental savings with over 800,000 tonnes of material recycled through the system each year from Australian homes. With the success of this packaging recovery, the challenge now is to encourage people to ‘Do the Right Thing’ away from home.
At the moment, approximately half of all drinks in Australia are consumed away from home with little being collected for reprocessing. Our objective is to recover drink packaging disposed of in public places and remove it from the general waste stream. We aim to provide the right bins in the right places with the right recycling messages and are working with our customers, such as tourist attractions, public events and shopping centres, to provide people on the go with a convenient way to dispose of packaging.
