Making our Packaging Circular

Making our Packaging Circular

Towards a circular economy

Our objective is to create packaging for our drinks that can be recycled or reused, so that it can be collected and transformed into new recycled packaging, such as an rPET bottle. This circular packaging approach reduces our carbon emissions and helps to lower packaging waste in the environment. We are making progress towards this by:

  • increasing recycled content with a focus on our primary packaging
  • building our in-house rPET production infrastructure
  • expanding reusable formats such as reusable glass bottles
  • supporting effective collection models in our markets, including Deposit Return Schemes in Europe and other types of locally relevant Extended Producer Responsibility schemes.

 


LitePac Top, our innovative secondary packaging in Austria LitePac Top, our innovative secondary packaging in Austria LitePac Top, our innovative secondary packaging in Austria

Packaging plays a vital role in keeping our products fresh and safe. Sustainable packaging and waste management are important to our business, given the amount of packaging we use, the variety of pack materials we use and the need to recover and recycle them after consumption.

Beverage packaging has value and life beyond its initial use, and we believe that it should be collected and recycled into a new package as part of a circular economy. To deliver this vision, we own, invest in and take responsibility for collected packaging material as members of authorised recovery organisations.

Our 2024 Sustainability Packaging Performance:

100%

of our primary packaging is already recyclable 

58%

overall packaging collection rate (excluding Egypt)

24%

rPET across our markets, compared with 16% in 2023

Collecting and recycling

In 2024, we continued to focus our efforts on increasing packaging collection rates across our territories.

  • From December 2023 to January 2025, new DRS went live in Romania, the Republic of Ireland, Hungary and Austria. DRS help to consistently deliver high packaging collection rates. For example, in Romania (launched December 2023) results are encouraging with an average return rate of 77% of containers sold in the market in the last three months of 2024.
  • In Nigeria, we built our first Coca-Cola System owned and operated packaging collection hub in 2024. It opened in January 2025, and we expect the hub to collect and process up to 13,000 metric tonnes of PET bottles once it is fully operational. We continued to support the work of the Food and Beverage Recycling Alliance (FBRA) and other packaging collection projects in the country.
  • Our overall packaging collection rate in 2024 was 58% (excluding Egypt). We expect this figure to increase significantly in 2025 when the full benefit from recent system launches in several countries is realised.

rPET

We make our packaging more sustainable by investing in recycled content and producing our own recycled PET (rPET). This gives us a high quality, steady supply of foodgrade rPET in selected markets, and reduces supplier and transport costs.

Our Mission 2025 objective is for 35% of the PET that we use across markets to be rPET. In 2024, we made significant progress, increasing to 24% rPET compared with 16% in 2023. We have committed to achieving 50% rPET in plastic bottles across our portfolio in EU markets and Switzerland by 2025. In these markets, the rPET we use increased to 46% by December 2024. In 2025, we expect to achieve over 60%, which exceeds our target.

Expanding reusable packaging

We keep our focus on delivering programmes that will increase reusable packaging – both refillable glass bottles and drinks dispensers, such as fountains or freestyle machines that use reusable vessels.

  • In 2024, across all our territories, 13% of the drinks sold were in returnable containers and 4% were through dispensers1. This implies an increase of 1pp in transactions in returnable containers compared with the previous year, with Africa leading the growth supporting both waste reduction and affordability. Dispensers, which are mostly used in sub-channels such as quick service restaurants, cinemas and leisure, are flat overall. This increase is in line with our Pack Mix of the Future vision where reusable packaging is expected to play a bigger role.
  • We continued to help our customers and consumers adopt new reuse models. In 2024, we worked with a leading university in Italy to deploy the first circular packaging campus. This allows students to enjoy our products while minimising the amount of packaging.We have installed new dispensers to offer great-tasting ‘packageless’ drinks to be consumed with reusable vessels. We also implemented a full bottle-to-bottle process by offering a wide range of drinks in 100% rPET bottles that can be collected through a reverse vending machine. The empties are then sent for recycling, and the flakes are used in our rPET production facility. We plan to offer similar schemes in 2025 across our territories once the business model is validated.

Eliminating unnecessary packaging

  • In 2024, we trialled a water-based adhesive that secures the layers of pallets together and eliminates layer pads in Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Nigeria. This has saved almost 2,000 tonnes of corrugated cardboard packaging.
  • We’ve completed testing a new, high-performing stretch film in Ireland and Austria that uses 30% less material and we will include it in our sparkling range in 2025.

Increasing recycled material in secondary packaging

  • We rolled out 100% post-consumer recycled shrink film for secondary packaging in Italy, Poland and Switzerland after a successful pilot.

1. Numbers refer to transactions and include Egypt

supporting-drs-europe supporting-drs-europe

Making our Packaging Circular

Click here to discover more about what we are doing to make our packaging more sustainable.

CASE STUDIES:

Supporting DRS in Europe

DRS are fast becoming the system of choice in Europe. They consistently deliver high rates of collection, typically over 90%, with an exceptional quality of foodgrade feedstock for recycling. This in turn supports higher recycling yields for bottle-to-bottle and can-to-can recycling compared with a co-mingled collection approach. Nine of our Coca-Cola HBC markets now have DRS in place, with two more expected in 2025 and up to 10 more anticipated in 2026-2028. 

Customer collaboration

We partnered with Carrefour Italy and developed a three-year sustainability-driven strategic roadmap with the objective to increase the share of beverages sold in rPET bottles by putting various initiatives in place. ‘Let’s recycle together’ was the first initiative that was deployed in co-operation with Marevivo, a local NGO protecting sea and environment. Dedicated in-store activations aimed to educate consumers on how to properly recycle beverage packaging and demonstrate the role that our 100% rPET portfolio plays in circular packaging. This joint initiative generated incremental sales and showed better results than previous activations, creating value for both us and Carrefour.

We strive to minimise food loss and food waste in our operations as this helps us preserve water and other natural resources, avoid carbon emissions and mitigate the social and economic impacts of agriculture. 

Food waste and loss targets

Our target to tackle food waste and loss across our activities and operations is:

  • to decrease our absolute food losses (in dry matter) by 30% by 2025 compared to our 2019 baseline despite volume growth, an increase in portfolio/beverage categories, and expansion to emerging markets, and further reduce by 40% by 2030 vs. 2019.

Food loss and waste coming at our manufacturing sites are part of the overall waste management process. We strive to reach 100% recycled waste and have zero waste to landfill. We have reduced the percentage of manufacturing waste going to landfill significantly: in 2024, only 1.6% of our manufacturing waste went to landfill, while in 2015 it was 10.1% (this means in 2024 98.4% of total manufacturing waste was recycled or used for alternative usage).

To achieve our waste reduction targets, we apply the waste hierarchy principles (waste pyramid): prevent/avoid, reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, waste disposal.

Programmes and processes to prevent, avoid and minimise food waste and loss

Our aim is to ensure efficient use and control of raw and packaging materials, and our operations in order to minimise all losses and waste, including food. It starts with the demand and supply chain planning process, batch management and traceability of the materials and products, quality control of all materials, semi-finished and finished products, control of the non-conforming products, inventory management across the value chain, engagement with suppliers, customers, distributors, co-packers, and other partners.

Within production efficiency management, our teams on the production floor are measuring and analysing the losses from their production lines and the overall line efficiency on a daily basis, using this knowledge to set actions for improvement.

Expired products are the biggest part of the food loss we generate. To minimise them, we have introduced a process called product age management. It allows us to set up a goal for each stage of the product life cycle. In the marketplace, with the Product Freshness programme, we control the expiry date and age of our products and thus minimise food waste and finish goods write off. We check and monitor the age and take measures at sales area and customer level.

We monitor the product age in our warehouses on a monthly basis, then we follow up the delivery age of the products with our customers and we monitor our product age (whether the products are within their defined primary age or expired) on customers’ shelves monthly as a last point of our checks. This gives us good insights on product rotation time, leads to improved planning of the product age at every step, and reduces the amount of expired products in the marketplace.

As we have implemented warehouse age monitoring on a monthly basis, and Total Age Management (TAM), we now have the opportunity to control our food loss and waste through S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) meetings, where products in warehouses close to expiration can be managed to avoid food waste through specific promotions, product sampling, internal consumption or charity donation.

Also based on market insights and demand levels, we can adjust our productions in the direction of food waste and loss avoidance through effective planning and sales processes.

Food waste and loss measuring

At production sites (plant level), we measure and separately collect each type of food loss (raw materials, manufacturing process, warehouse activities, storage, transportation). Each category of food loss is recorded in our specialised software and monitored at least monthly.

At the retail level (our customers), we measure the age of every finished good with our Total Age Monitoring (TAM) programme, and we take measures to avoid expired products.

Food waste and loss reporting and performance review

We utilise our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for reporting the food losses/waste. It is part of the overall business loss software solution. All food losses/waste are traced monthly, per country and per reason. More than 20 different reasons are assigned in our system for any business loss, and we use these reason codes for performing a deep analysis. As part of the monthly performance review, every function evaluates the absolute number of losses (in units and monetary terms), its percentage against the total volume of product sold, the trend vs. the last reporting period and vs. target, the reasons and root causes, and develops action plans for reduction. Annual targets are set at the country level.

Alternative use

In case food waste from expired products is unavoidable, we evaluate if these products are fit for human consumption and we work with different charity organisations and partners to redistribute them, such as FoodCloud, Fareshare and the Red Cross. 

Here are some examples of what we’re doing: 

  • Across the island of Ireland, we are partnering with FoodCloud and FareShare to introduce a new food sourcing strategy to reduce food waste and double the volume of food redistributed in Ireland to 5,100 tonnes annually by 2025, preventing 16,000 tonnes of CO2e and providing approximately 12 million meals.
  • In Italy, we donated over 1 million litres of beverages nearing expiry date to Banco Alimentare (Italian Food Bank) who distributed them to those in need. 
  • In Lithuania, we aid Maisto Bankas, offering beverages to low-income families and social risk families.  
  • In Hungary, we joined the World Food Day Convoy, for the eighth time, delivering 30 tonnes to families in need. We also partner with the Hungarian Food Bank Association to minimise food waste while supporting our communities.  
  • In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we have donated more than 760,000 litres of beverages to food banks through partnerships with local organisations.  
  • In Switzerland, through our ongoing collaboration with Tischlein deck dich, we distributed over 200,000 litres of beverages nearing expiry to those affected by poverty.   

If products cannot be used for human consumption, they go through anaerobic digestion, either in our own wastewater treatment facilities or at external wastewater treatment facilities. The product is crushed, with the liquid part recycled (treated to the levels supporting aquatic life) and the remaining part (sludge, which is the dry food loss), after further treatment, used for alternative purposes such as composting for agricultural needs or incineration for energy recovery and biogas/biofuel.

 

To view data for all years, scroll to the right using the scroll bar at the bottom of the table.

Food loss and waste data1 2019

2020

2021

2022 2023 20241 Target 2024

Target 2025

Target 2030

Total weight of food loss and waste with water content (no conversion to dry matter) (tonnes) 54,154 42,077 32,390 32,139 38,742 44,538      
Avoided2 food waste (redistributed for human consumption) in dry matter (tonnes)     25 126 264 153      

Total weight of all food loss and waste in dry matter (tonnes)

5,445

4,320

3,343

2,193 2,371 2,581 <3,267

30% reduction
vs. 2019 

(3,812 tonnes)

40% reduction
vs. 2019 

(3,267 tonnes)

Total weight of food loss and waste used for alternative purposes (in dry matter) (tonnes)

1,462

1,572

1,433

1,432 1,709 1,733      

Redistributed for anaerobic congestion
(on-site waste water treatment or external waste water treatment) (tonnes)

132 147 134 295 1,147 1,115      

Redistributed for land application (composting) (tonnes)

214 455 158 145 111 172      

Redistributed for energy recovery (biogas/biofuel) (tonnes)

1,117 969 1,142 992 451 446      

Food loss/waste intensity (tonnes per tonne of product sold)

0.00047

0.00039

0.00027

0.00018 0.000183 0.00019 <0.01    
1 Egypt acquisition done in January 2022 is excluded in years 2019 to 2023. Since 2024 the Egyptian data is included.
2 Redistribution for human consumption - products close to expiry date, not food waste.
3 Corrected formulae in 2024 (instead of 0.00017 the correct figure is 0.00018).