As You Sow grades US beverage companies

Since publication of the first report, As You Sow has been working with several major beverage corporations to foster such outcomes.

This year’s report evaluates new and ongoing efforts by beverage producers to:

• Reduce materials use
• Increase recycled content in containers
• Raise recovery and recycling rates
• Support public policy initiatives
• Increase container recycling rates
• Disclose such activities to stakeholders.

The 2008 US Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and Report is based primarily on responses to As You Sow’s Beverage Container Recycling Survey, which was sent to 23 beverage companies, and on publicly available information from websites and corporate social responsibility reports. Seven companies responded to the survey.

As You Sow highlighted the following findings in its 2008 report:

• Coca-Cola Co outranks its beverage industry peers overall, leading in commitments and performance on beverage container source reduction, company-wide recovery goals and investments in recycling programmes. It has pledged to recover 50% of its plastic bottles and cans by 2015.
• Leadership in Recycled Plastic and Aluminium: PepsiCo reports the highest percentage use of recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in its bottles (10%) followed by Coca-Cola at 3%. No other company consistently uses recycled PET. Anheuser-Busch uses standard aluminium industry ingots with 41% recycled content, whereas Coca-Cola and Red Bull report that they exceed the standard.
• Nestlé Waters North America showed the greatest improvement since publication of As You Sow’s 2006 Scorecard, and recently set an industry-wide goal of recycling 60% of PET bottles by 2018.

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• r Pepper/Snapple doesn’t have public beverage container recycling goals, nor has announced programmes to boost recycling rates, and is the largest beverage firm not to respond to the survey for this report.

As You Sow also commended smaller companies such as Fiji Water for making notable endorsements of container deposit legislation that would significantly boost beverage container recycling.

Four categories (source reduction, recycled content, beverage container recycling and transparency) were evaluated, among these beverage companies received the highest scores in Source Reduction. This is a testament to individual companies’ long-term commitments to lightweighting packaging in order to reduce costs and, in recent years, environmental footprints.

The report is organised according to the four categories, with a final chapter on recommendations. It’s available to download for free on the As You Sow website.