World Without Waste – A Step Towards a Green Tomorrow

Being one of the largest beverage companies in India, we had to take several steps towards making initiatives focus on sustainability and a greener tomorrow. With the World Without Waste initiative of The Coca-Cola Company, we plan on anchoring three pillars – making our packaging completely recyclable by 2025, using about 50% recyclable material in our packaging design by 2030 and collecting every bottle or can we sell. 

As one of India’s largest bottling companies, we’ve endeavored the complete collection and recycling of our plastics, even though our targets were set at around 70%. Our efforts to right-weight PET bottles have saved a few thousand tonnes of plastic over the last year, which includes design changes and new ASSP bottles as well. In our shrink films, we have managed to achieve around 30% PCR (post-consumer recylate) in trials, however, this is estimated to become approximately 24 MT annually once this has been rolled out nationwide.  

Once we started our journey at World Without Waste, HCCB has saved about 20,000 MT of plastic over the years. And our journey towards plastic circularity continues as we upgrade our plastic waste management methodology and plan to use more and more recycled content in our bottles going forward. Working with multiple vendors, we’re conducting trials for PET bottles with rPET (bottle to bottle recycling).

In the interest of collecting good quality PET, we’ve also launched reverse logistics plans which include Reverse Vending Machines (RVM) and Smart NFT bins at key spots across the country. Currently, we have placed about 45 RVMs across the country and plan to scale this up even further with better PET and rPET trials. By switching to rPET, the savings of emissions could go upwards of 1 tonnes of CO2e per tonne of 100% rPET.

We commenced our journey with UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in 2018 and set up around 32 material recovery facilities across the country. Through this, we collected several thousand tonnes of plastic over 5 years and benefited more than 5,000 safai sathis by providing them with basic social and financial benefits. These safai sathis derive their livelihood from the ecosystem of plastic circularity and social inclusion initiatives by Government of India. The UN agency’s main agenda of this sector is to help move it from informal to formal. The UNDP has been assisting safai sathis, by linking them to certain social protection schemes like ‘Jan Dhan’ accounts, Adhaar Cards, `Ayushman Bharat’, pension schemes, and scholarships for children, among others. 

Apart from plastic, we’re also working on leveraging the proven circularity of returnable glass bottles (RGB). They’re designed to reduce waste and minimize environmental impact. We feel that the use of glass bottles in certain instances not only reduces our carbon footprint but is also sustainable. RGB is also our commitment to accelerating beverage packaging solutions while keeping waste out of the ecosystem. The World Without Waste strategy has completely revolutionized our focus on the packaging lifecycle — from how bottles and cans are designed and produced to how they’re collected, recycled, and repurposed.

With the help of our climate conscious partners and consumers, we strive to create a low carbon and inclusive world where useful materials like plastic, glass, aluminum and paper are recycled to improve the environment, benefit stakeholders while continuing to refresh our consumers.     

As a leading soft drink manufacturer, our goal is to achieve net-zero carbon over the next twenty years and through science-based targets, we are continually evolving and learning in every aspect of our value chain, for a better tomorrow.