Did you know that all of our bottles and cans are 100% recyclable? So once you’ve enjoyed your drink and recycle it you’re breathing new life into it.

But we know that making our bottles recyclable is only half the battle. For that to really make a difference, we need to ensure they do get recycled. And once that happens, they can be turned into new bottles.

At the moment in Great Britain, around 70 per cent of plastic bottles are recycled, so we know that there’s still more to be done. There’s two ways we’re addressing that challenge. Firstly through calling for reform of the recycling and recovery system in Great Britain, which includes the introduction of a well-designed deposit return scheme, and secondly through using our packs and advertising to remind people our bottles and cans can be recycled.

Recycle Week: 23-29 September 2019

This week marks the 17th annual Recycle Week, organised by WRAP under the Recycle Now brand. It’s a week-long opportunity for us all to discuss the potential that a better approach to recycling has to offer, and it’s why we’ve chosen today to launch our new ‘Round in Circles’ campaign.

The campaign’s message? It’s a simple one: plastic bottles are only single-use if we throw them away rather than recycle. Through ‘Round in Circles’, we want to remind our consumers that all of our bottles are 100% recyclable and we want them all back, which is essential to creating a circular economy for plastic bottles and packaging.

The creative, which will be live across digital, print and out-of-home features a number of different Coca-Cola brands and interweaves information into circular artwork, referencing our commitment to helping develop a true circular economy for our packaging.

“Recycle Week 2019 is focused on taking action and this certainly goes to prove that brands like Coca-Cola are committed to making a difference to our environment.” Says Craig Stephens, Recycle Now campaign manager. “We are thrilled by the new campaign from Coca-Cola, launched today and their ongoing commitment as one of our founding UK Plastics Pact members.”

As you can see in our ‘Lifecycle of a Coca-Cola bottle’ infographic, when we get recycled bottles back we can turn them into plastic pellets, ready to be used again to make fresh packaging – and so the cycle continues! But that can only happen at the rate we want it to if recycling levels go up.

Help us send plastic round in circles.

Kris Robbens, Marketing Director, Coca-Cola Great Britain said: “With this campaign we want to raise awareness that all of our bottles can be recycled and turned into new ones. As well as taking action to make our packaging as sustainable as possible, it’s important that we use our marketing and communications to encourage more people to recycle our bottles after they have enjoyed the drink. They are more likely to do this if they know they can be turned into new bottles again. Across all of our brands we want to use more recycled material in all of our packaging, however that requires more of it to be collected so that it can be reused to make new bottles.”

Our ambition for a more sustainable future

Our ‘Round in Circles’ campaign is just the latest action we’re taking as part of our sustainable packaging strategy in Great Britain. First announced in 2017, the strategy set out our ambition to work with others to ensure that all packaging is recovered, so that more is recycled and none ends up as waste.

Just last week, we announced that we’ll no longer be using plastic shrink-wrap packaging on our multipack cans sold in Great Britain. Instead, we’ll be using 100% recyclable, sustainably sourced cardboard. This means that the 30 million+ packs sold to our fans each year will no longer be wrapped in plastic – helping us to save 4,000 tonnes of plastic from being used in our operations across Western Europe.

We’re also on our way to increasing the amount of pre-recycled plastic (rPET) in all our packaging to 50% by 2020 – making Coca-Cola the biggest user of recycled PET plastic in Great Britain – while smartwater bottles just became the first in our portfolio to be made from 100% rPET material. Similarly, Sprite bottles are changing from green to clear plastic in order to ease the recycling process.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a range of initiatives to help encourage recycling, above and beyond this new campaign. One recent example is our ‘reverse vending machines’ at a host of Merlin Entertainment’s leading attractions, which offer money off vouchers in return for recycled bottles.

On top of this, we have a goal to help collect and recycle the equivalent of every bottle or can we sell worldwide by 2030, as part of our global vision for a World Without Waste.

Looking for more info? As always, you can find out everything you need to know about our sustainability vision in the UK right here.