THE WHOLE PACKAGE

Learn about our plan to recover and recycle every single can and bottle the Coca Cola system sell.

Here at Coca‑Cola packaging is a crucial element of our business, helping to keep our drinks fresh, hygienic and portable.

In fact, we’re one of Ireland’s biggest users of packaging materials, so we’re constantly on the lookout for improvements and innovations to lessen our impact on the environment.

We have a ‘zero waste’ packaging vision, where every element is 100 per cent recyclable. To help us move towards this goal, we've made a commitment to:

Reduce

Every year we produce about 67 million of our iconic glass bottles in Ireland. You may not even have noticed the tiny changes to the shape and size of the bottle, but we've made it 20 per cent lighter. Our plastic bottles have changed too – they now weigh 22g and are 22 per cent lighter.

We've also evolved our aluminium cans – the can 'wall' has been reduced to the thickness of a human hair, making it five per cent lighter than previous designs. Our design has been adopted across the drinks industry and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) estimates that the new can design will save 15,000 tonnes of aluminium across the EU each year, cutting CO2 emissions by about 78,000 tonnes.

Recycle

Over 98 percent of the waste generated by our partners Coca‑Cola HBC in the production plant for the island of Ireland is recycled, with less than 1 percent going to landfill.

We also encourage our consumers to recycle cans and bottles, working with Repak in the Republic of Ireland and Wastepack in Northern Ireland to fund packaging recycling.

Reuse

The majority of our glass bottles can be returned to us and are reused in our production process. We’re also looking at how we can increase the use of recycled material in our plastic bottle.

Globally we’ve introduced lots of initiatives to improve and increase recycling. Take a look at our ‘Recycle Happiness’ vending machine in Singapore.