The Coca Cola Company is a multinational leader in the beverage industry, best known for its flagship product, Coca-Cola. With such global recognition, their sustainability efforts are significantly prominent, with different geographical regions having different initiatives to help the world generally, especially less fortunate communities.
In the United States, their latest Sustainability commitment called “Me, We, World” has the goal of creating social value and making a positive difference for the consumers and communities they serve. This commitment is aimed at ‘Enhancing personal well-being’ (Me) by offering low or no-calorie beverage options in every market, providing transparent nutrition information on their packages, among other initiatives. It is also aimed at ‘Building strong communities’ (We), by enabling the economic empowerment of 5 million women entrepreneurs by 2020, complying with Human and Workplace standards, as well as giving back 1% of their annual operating income. Finally, this commitment to Sustainability also involves ‘Protecting the environment’ (World). They aim to do this by replenishing 100% of water used in their finished products, sustainably source key agricultural ingredients, reducing the carbon footprint of their drinks by 25%, as well as many other goals.
In the United Kingdom, their Sustainability initiative titled “Live Positively” recognized the various components of Coca Cola products that needed to be more sustainable and developed different sustainability targets for them. “Sustainability has to be part of everything we do, in the areas of water, emissions, waste and recycling” For example, regarding Packaging, “Our goal is to advance a packaging framework in which our packaging is no longer seen as waste, but as a valuable resource for future use”. In regards to water consumption, “Our goal is to safely return to nature and communities an amount of water equivalent to what we use in all of our beverages and their production.” Regarding the overall production of their product, “Our goal is to grow the business, not the carbon in our manufacturing operations. We improve the energy efficiency and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in cold drink equipment” – Coca-Cola UK, Live Positively Sustainability.
In addition to its sustainability projects to overall help the environment and the well-being of their consumers, Coca-Cola also undertakes projects regarding their suppliers. The main way they try to implement some sort of control among their suppliers is with their Supplier Guiding Principles as well as Workplace Rights Principles. They both prohibit the use of all forms of forced labor, including prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor, military labor, slave labor and human trafficking. The Supplier Guiding Principles communicate to their suppliers, Coca-Cola’s expectations of them. It emphasizes the importance of Workplace and Human rights, as well as environmental and local labor laws that these suppliers have to abide by. To ensure that their suppliers comply with the rules of the Supplier Guiding Principles, Coca-Cola employs third parties to assess them, and if the supplier fails to uphold any part of the Supplier Guiding Principles, they are expected to take corrective actions.
Furthermore, in the summer of 2012, Coca Cola released Sustainable Agriculture Guiding Principles for their suppliers that supply agricultural ingredients. These principles established human and workplace rights, environmental stewardship and farm management criteria- which asked suppliers to protect the right of communities to maintain access to land and natural resources.
Coca-Cola recognizes the fact that they have the ability to make a huge impact and improve the livelihoods of many people, and through the Sustainable Agriculture Guiding Principles, they aim to educate farmers on sustainability, and generally help to try to improve the livelihood of people “We know we can influence and improve livelihoods for hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of farmers by more active engagement, we expect our guiding principles to ultimately have the greatest impact at the farm level, where some of the greatest strides toward sustainability can be made.” – Director of Sustainability at Coca Cola, Ben Jordan.
Coca-Cola is also part of Bonsucro (A Better Sugarcane Initiative), and has worked with peer companies, WWF, and other NGOs to implement a metric standard for sustainable sugarcane production for its sugarcane producers. When a sugar mill Brazil, became the first to achieve Bonsucro certification, Coca-Cola became the first buyer of the mill’s certified sugar. This action, encouraged their other suppliers to aim to improve their sugarcane production and make the process more sustainable
In my opinion, Coca-Cola does an excellent job with its sustainability efforts. Their sustainability efforts span from economic to environmental to social sustainability. They try to be environmentally sustainable by trying to replenish 100% of the water they use in their products, as well as reducing the carbon footprint of their product by 25%. They are also socially responsible in the sense that they try to promote the wellbeing of their consumers and, as well as protecting the human and working rights of every employee in their supply chain, even down to the farmers. However, I do think they can improve in the actual content of their drinks as well as its effect on their consumers. It’s not enough to be more transparent regarding nutrition information and providing a lower calorie option, they also have to re-evaluate the ingredients in their bottles, because it’s no secret that critics have bombarded consumers with the dangers of what Coke does to the human body. If they are really concerned with the wellbeing of their consumers (as indicated in the Me, We, World sustainability commitment), they need to address these issues, and make their drinks less damaging to consumers.