Speaker is Brianna Kinney, host: When you’re enjoying your favorite Coca-Cola product, do you think about the environment? The group director for Coca-Cola’s global sustainability Scott Vitters does.
Speaker is Scott Vitters, group director for Coca-Cola’s global sustainability: From an environmental sustainability perspective, we really focus on three areas where we think we can make a difference and where we have an impact. Those areas are around water stewardship, our No. 1 ingredient and an area where we as a community as well as an industry need to continue to improve and ensure that we’re stewarding that resource to energy or climate protection and our work on things like fleet as well as our own operations, our cold-drink equipment, to finally, the area that I spend most of my time focused on, which is sustainable packaging and ways that we really drive waste out of the entire packaging value chain.
Question: Can you describe the MSU/Coca-Cola partnership?
Vitters: We’re really excited to be launching a new center for packaging innovation and sustainability. It’s focused on really looking at what is the value of packaging, what is the difference it makes in terms of enhancing sustainability and then exploring opportunities for continuing to improve environmental performance as well as looking at next generation technologies. What’s excited about it is it’s a collaboration between the packaging departments, the supply chain, marketing as well as the engineering school and really brings together the different parties that play a key role in determining the overall environmental performance of a package.
Question: What can we all do in our daily lives to enhance sustainability?
Vitters: The one thing that I would say that everybody has an opportunity to do is participate in recycling. Recycling services are available to a majority of the population in the United States today, and it truly does make a difference. I know there’s a lot of discussion of whether it matters or not, but it improves in terms of reducing waste as well as saving energy, so I’d encourage everybody to do that. In terms of a message around Coca-Cola, I think one observation is understanding our operating model, our business model. Often people get focused on the size of The Coca-Cola Company or more importantly, the Coca-Cola system, where we’re made up of 300 bottling partners. These are local jobs, local people that are using local resources. We’ve got 900 manufacturing facilities, so we’re not shipping for a majority of our products materials around the world vs. using resources that are local and then producing locally relevant products. We have over 2,800 different non-alcoholic beverage offerings, so a wide variety of offerings that extend beyond just the sparkling beverages of a Coke, Diet Coke or a Sprite that I think a lot of people are traditionally familiar with.
Question: Please summarize Coca-Cola’s views on sustainability.
Vitters: We’ve set some ambitious environmental goals for ourselves in the area of packaging. We have a vision for zero waste. We have been doing some leadership efforts in terms of advancing recycling. We’ve got our own recycling collection company that’s focused on collecting 100 percent of our bottles and cans. We’ve opened or directly invested in six recycling plants that are capable of taking plastic bottles and turning that into new material to be able to be used again, including our most recent which will be the world’s largest that we opened in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But, we’ve got a long way to go and I think what’s important is through partnerships like this work with Michigan State University where we’re bringing together academic partners as well as other partners within industry will push us to go even further to move even faster and really advance us toward that ultimate destination of zero waste.
Kinney: Sustainability goes better with Coke. This greening of the Great Lakes broadcast is produced by Michigan State University and WJR radio for mlive.com.