The Coca-Cola Company has set a target of recovering and reusing one bottle for every bottle we bring to market by 2030. After all, we have to stop our packaging from polluting the ocean or the countryside, or ending up in landfill. Thanks to Germany’s deposit system for drinks containers, we have all but achieved this target already for the German market, and other countries have national deposit systems or local collection facilities of their own. However, many countries still lack collection systems for used materials, meaning there are major challenges still to be overcome. The experience we have gained in Germany can help us to meet these challenges. Ideally, both deposit-based and local collection systems should be equipped to handle as many different materials and types of packaging as possible. Germany has been a pioneer in this area and gained a wealth of experience, both positive and negative. Prevent can make use of this experience to organise the transfer of knowledge to other countries, so that these countries can develop and operate their own functioning and viable collection systems to reflect their local conditions. We want to use our know-how and worldwide network to contribute to this knowledge transfer.
For us, circular economy means recovering all the packaging we put on the market so that it can be reused or recycled into new packaging. Coca-Cola started Germany’s deposit-based system for soft drinks containers back in 1929. Today it is Germany’s largest operator of systems for returning packaging; the proportion of our packaging that is returned is well above the average for the soft drinks market. Much of our non-returnable packaging also comes back as part of the deposit system, which covers 99.9% of our packaging. Non-returnable packaging is recycled, after which it can be used for a variety of purposes. However, our aim is to use as much of the recycled packaging as possible to produce new drinks containers, and we’ve been doing it with our glass bottles and drinks cans for decades. We already use 33 per cent recycled material in our non-returnable PET bottles too, and we want to increase that figure to 50 per cent by 2025. However, there is currently a shortage of recycled PET suitable for use in the food industry, because the collected and sorted PET in the deposit system is also in high demand in other industries. Finally, we are also implementing the principle of the circular economy in our production processes. Thanks to an efficient separation system, our flagship plant at Genshagen in Germany already recycles 99 per cent of all waste materials generated during production; we have already rolled out the same system to a number of other sites.