Coca-Cola To Reach Water Sustainability Goal Five Years Early

Coca-Cola says it is way ahead of schedule in meeting its top water sustainability goal.

The company pledged eight years ago to replenish to the environment an amount of water equal to its sales volume by 2020. But the company has met its goal five years early, replenishing 160 billion liters.

“Coca-Cola said that by the end of the year, it and its bottlers would reach its goal of returning water to the environment and to communities around the world. Coca-Cola uses roughly 300 billion liters each year to produce about 160 billion liters of ‘finished beverages’ — Coke, Sprite, Fanta and hundreds of other brands,” the New York Times reported.

To meet the goal, the company has explored various avenues of water sustainability. That includes ”making more efficient use of water in its plants and putting into effect wastewater treatment standards for its manufacturing facilities, as well as developing community water projects around the world that focus on, among other things, providing safe water and sanitation, supporting water conservation and protecting watersheds,” the report said.

Here’s what Coca-Cola means by “replenishment,” per The Huffington Post:

By “replenishing,” Coke does not literally mean it’s putting back the water it takes out of each locality where it operates. To come up with its number on replenishment, Coke and its partner, the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, measured the amount of water it reclaimed through various conservation efforts around the globe -- everything from tallgrass restoration in North Texas to reforestation in Ghana to canal rehabilitation in Kyrgyzstan. The company is involved in hundreds of these projects.

Coke CEO Muhtar Kent explained the rationale behind the company’s so-called “water neutrality” aspirations.

“As a consumer of water, the Coca-Cola system has a special responsibility to protect this shared resource. This is why we set an aspirational goal of being water neutral by 2020,” he said in a statement. “While we have made significant progress toward making that goal a reality, we are more intent than ever to give back the equivalent of all the water that we use to communities and nature. And we will continue to do so after we meet the 100 percent goal.”

Water sustainability is in the company’s best interests, according to Bloomberg:

The program isn’t philanthropic so much as a strategic business imperative, Greg Koch, global director of water stewardship at Coca-Cola, said in an interview. Local water access is vital to the company’s success, he said, since “the price point that we sell our products demands that we manufacture and distribute locally.”

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