The global drinks giant fumbles its carbon figures
The global drinks giant fumbles its carbon figuresThe Coca-Cola Company has been around for more than 130 years, operates in over 200 countries and markets more than 2,800 sparkling and still beverage products.
Sales last year were more than $28 billion, achieved through serving up products to customers at an astonishing 1.5 billion a day. It owns four of the world’s top five non-alcoholic sparkling beverage brands namely: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite and Fanta.
With the release of its latest sustainability review last month we aim to find out whether this giant of the soft drinks industry is also leading the way in addressing climate change.
Coca-Cola states its climate strategy as: “working to grow our business but not the carbon emissions of our manufacturing operations”. This doesn’t sound like a particularly ambitious goal but even so Coca-Cola is not currently achieving this. In 2007, greenhouse gas emissions totalled 4.92 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, an increase of 0.06 million metric tons from 2006.
Rather confusingly, this figure doesn’t match up with that given in its response to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) – where direct emissions (scope 1 and 2) total 7.2 million metric tons. Whichever figure is correct they both show that, unsurprisingly for one of the largest companies in the world, Coca-Cola has a sizeable climate impact, and currently this is not decreasing.
Although an overall carbon footprint is given, the emissions sources included are not clearly specified. In fact Coca-Cola reports little in the way of quantitative data.
The headline figures show that there was a 4% increase in energy efficiency last year however this merely cancelled out the 4% decrease the year before - so essentially the ratio of megajoules/litre of product has not improved for the last three years.
No further information is given on how the energy consumed in Coca-Cola’s plants is generated – neither is there any information on the corresponding carbon emissions of this energy use.
The Coca Cola company does not own or control most of its bottling partners, which produce and distribute around four fifths of the total volume of Coca-Cola brands. This illustrates the much larger indirect impact the company has.
Coca-Cola does produce its own Supplier Guiding Principles for its suppliers, that include “responsible environmental and workplace policies and practices”. But the extent to which these focus on climate change is not clear. No data at present appears to be collected on the climate change impact of either Coca-Cola’s suppliers or partners.
Unlike its rival Pepsi-Co, it is not part of the CDP’s Corporate Supply Chain programme. However, in collaboration with the Carbon Trust, Coca-Cola is working on establishing a product carbon footprint.
The report does indicate the areas in which Coca-Cola believes it has “the biggest climate protection opportunity”. These three areas include: cold drink equipment (largely due to the high global warming potential of refrigerant gases), facilities and bottling plants and transportation.
Brief qualitative goals are given for all three but climate change impacts are not given and targets are not set. More detail is given in its CDP response: Coca-Cola estimates that the annual CO2-equivalent emissions from cold drink equipment are around 15 million metric tons – around three times the carbon footprint reported in the sustainability review.
Coca-Cola has undertaken some initiatives to help reduce these refrigerant emissions. For example, it developed technology to decrease cooling equipment energy use by up to 35% and has deployed this to 1 million (10%) of its units around the world.
It has also joined Refrigerants, Naturally!, a global initiative of companies working to substitute harmful fluorinated gases with natural refrigerants. Coca-Cola's initiatives for transport include replacing 325 of 800 sales vehicles with hybrids.
Although these are steps in the right direction it’s difficult to assess how Coca-Cola is targeting priority areas and more importantly how much progress it’s making. On its website Coca-Cola states, “We collect system-wide environmental performance data on an annual basis”.
This announcement will leave concerned stakeholders wondering why the company chooses to publish anecdotal case studies and initiatives rather than meaningful reporting data.
The company may have other sustainability issues that it considers to be of greater impact – obesity and water use to name a couple – but for a company of its size other pertinent sustainability issues are no reason for inadequate reporting on climate change.
The fact that Coca-Cola has a goal to stabilise rather than decrease emissions neatly sums up its attitude in this area. To improve its climate change reporting Coca-Cola could benefit from adopting a more transparent approach and develop a strategy to decrease both its direct and indirect carbon footprint.
This story first appeared on ClimateChangeCorp.com, Ethical Corporation’s online sister publication on business and climate change. www.climatechangecorp.com