We are focused on delivering on our purpose, to accelerate our collective action to address challenges that impact our business and the communities we serve. Our approach is centred around people. While the focus must be on how best to achieve key sustainability goals, as a collective we need to be mindful in our responses of the varied needs and changing circumstances of communities around us. The answer lies in collaboration and co-creation of sustainable solutions. As the Coca-Cola system, we use our industry leadership to be part of the solution to achieve positive change and to build a more sustainable future for our planet. Importantly, we want to create greater shared opportunity for the business and the communities we serve, across our value chain.
Water
Water is a priority for the Coca-Cola system because it is essential to life, our beverages and the communities we serve. The Coca-Cola Company’s 2030 Water Security Strategy focuses on increasing water security by investing in water initiatives that benefit nature and communities. This includes projects that provide benefits to local watersheds that supply water for drinking, agriculture and manufacturing, restore and conserve habitats for plants and animals and offer opportunities for local economic development.
As part of this work, we collaborate with partners to understand the complex link between water, climate, agriculture and biodiversity. In addition, many of our water replenishment projects have additional co-benefits such as helping to improve soil health, sequester carbon, conserve water, restore degraded lands, contribute to biodiversity and mitigate climate change. We are focused on accelerating the actions needed to increase water security where we operate, source ingredients and touch people’s lives. We do that by contributing towards sustainable, clean water access that improves livelihoods and wellbeing while protecting against water-related disasters.
We continue to replenish the water we use in our finished beverages to nature and communities. We have set three key goals designed to achieve our vision:
- Achieve 100% regenerative water use across our facilities in areas identified as facing high levels of water stress by 2030
- Improve the health of watersheds identified as most critical for our operations and agricultural supply chain by 2030
- Continue to return water to nature and communities. Ensuring the health of watersheds is a major part of this.
For example, as CCBSA we successfully implemented Project Lungisa in Grabouw in the Western Cape, where the municipality was losing a significant amount of its potable water due to leaks and failing infrastructure. Through this partnership, we trained young community members in plumbing to support the rehabilitation of water infrastructure, including fixing leaks in informal areas. In response to a looming Day Zero in parts of the Eastern Cape, CCBSA launched an ambitious project to work with the local municipality and other key stakeholders to assist vulnerable and distressed communities. Since 2020, CCBSA deployed an off-grid, solar-powered groundwater harvesting and treatment initiative called Cokevilles. In the region, a total of nine systems, or boreholes, have been deployed in Gqeberha with a potential of replenishing a minimum of 90-million litres per annum at no cost to the beneficiaries. Last year the company unveiled a R12-million groundwater harvesting Cokeville project, to supply the entire town of Graaff Reinet in the Eastern Cape with potable water. The Cokeville mega project was installed to feed directly into the municipality’s infrastructure and is able to supply between 27-million and 30-million litres of water every month to the town and surrounding communities. Since the inception of our borehole groundwater harvesting programme, we have managed to replenish hundreds of millions of litres of water in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Free State and the Eastern Cape provinces, benefitting thousands of households.
Building resilience through partnerships and innovation
We understand that no entity can solve the water challenges alone. We believe in collective action and partnership to tackle development issues. It is important that all relevant stakeholders have a voice, an investment and a shared understanding of the outcomes to ensure we deal with the lack of access to safe water. As CCBSA we believe in and are committed to solution-driven conversations for a better future for all.