Our commitment to respecting human rights is fundamental to our 2020 Vision and our ability to operate a successful global enterprise.
At The Coca-Cola Company, respect for human and workplace rights is engrained in our culture and guides our interactions with bottling partners, suppliers, customers, consumers, employees and the communities we serve. Our Human Rights Policy, along with our Supplier Guiding Principles, establishes a foundation for managing our business around the world in accordance with our commitment to respect human rights.
In 2011, The Coca-Cola Company formally endorsed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted by UN Human Rights Council in 2011. We have and continue to implement all three of the components that must be put in place in a corporate context under the Principles:
On behalf of everyone at The Coca-Cola Company,
thank you for your interest in our sustainability
journey.
As a company and a worldwide
system that includes our bottling partners,
Coca-Cola is committed to creating value for
the communities we proudly serve and the
planet we all share.
Sustainability is at the heart of our business.
And as a business, we know that sustainability
efforts are themselves only sustainable when
they help our enterprise grow and prosper.
Indeed, we believe this work must be integral
to our mission of refreshing the world,
inspiring moments of optimism and happiness,
creating value and making a difference.
As a result, we’ve chosen to focus our
leadership on three areas of fundamental
importance to our business—areas where we
believe we have the best opportunity to make
a lasting positive difference. We call them the
“Three Ws”: Women, Water and Well-Being.
We also continue to implement sustainability
programs across other areas of our operations.
We know that we don’t have all the answers,
all the access or all the know-how. On the
contrary, we believe that, in a world of great
challenges and even greater opportunities,
we must work side by side with our bottling
and industry partners, non-governmental
organizations, universities, government
agencies and others.
Working together, we can unlock the
collaborative power of the “Golden Triangle”
of business, government and civil society
organizations, making a much greater
collective impact than any one organization or
even sector could hope to achieve alone.
As for our overarching goals, we’re striving to
enable the economic empowerment of
5 million Women entrepreneurs within our
global value chain by 2020. Since launching
this initiative, which we call 5by20™, in 2010,
we’ve made a difference in the lives of more
than 550,000 women and their families as we
pilot, scale and replicate the best ideas.
In Water, we’re working to balance the water
we use by 2020, returning to communities and
nature an amount of water equal to that used
in our beverages and their production. We’re
currently on track to achieve this water goal,
replenishing an estimated 68 percent of the
volume of our finished beverages in 2013 and
returning a calculated 108.5 billion liters to
communities and nature.
As for Well-Being, we’re committed to,
among other things, helping our consumers
make informed choices by providing an ever
expanding selection of reduced-, low-, and nocalorie beverages along with front-of-package
nutritional labeling. And we’re working toward
Muhtar Kent with a 5by20 entrepreneur in South Africa.
2013/2014 SUSTAINABILITY REPORT Intro Me We World Reporting Index
3
our goal to support physical activity programs in
each of the more than 200 markets we serve. To
date, we’ve supported more than 290 programs
in nearly 125 countries and territories.
In how we operate, we’ve made great strides
in our packaging initiatives with focus on
recycling programs and innovations like
PlantBottle™ packaging—the first commercially
scalable plastic bottle made partially from
plants. Meeting ambitious goals is always
challenging work, and progress in some areas
has been slower than we would like.
For example, we had hoped to source 25 percent
of our PET plastic from recycled or renewable
material by 2015. To date, we’ve reached six
percent. One hurdle here has been posed by
regulatory restrictions on the use of recycled
material in drink packaging. Another has been
the rising cost of recycled plastic due to higher
demand. We’re now working on both issues,
encouraging regulatory reform and higher rates
of recycling, which should help control costs.
Of course, as a worldwide business that
operates locally in almost every corner of the
globe, our sustainability efforts go beyond our
three key focus areas. We also support and
measure our sustainability progress against the
principles outlined in the United Nations Global
Compact and Millennium Development Goals.
Day by day, week by week, month by
month, The Coca-Cola Company and our
bottling partners are moving forward on our
sustainability journey. I invite you to follow our
progress on Coca-Cola Journey. Your input is
invaluable as we aim to improve and grow our
business the right way—sustainably. We look
forward to hearing from you.
Very best wishes,
Muhtar Kent
Chairman of the Board and
Chief Executive Officer
The Coca-Cola Company
The growth opportunities are strong for the
nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage industry,
as the global middle class grows and more
people move from rural areas to live in cities.
Even so, we see a number of challenges to our
industry, from sedentary lifestyles and obesity
to locally stressed water supplies, evolving
consumer tastes and increasing competition.
The Coca-Cola Company is taking action to
overcome each of these challenges while
continuing to offer high quality and refreshing
beverages to consumers all around the world.
And we believe our sustainability efforts have
an essential role to play in helping to mitigate
risks and create new business opportunities.
Overall, I’d say we’re making good progress
in most areas of sustainability. Even so,
we’re far from satisfied. Instead, we remain
constructively discontent as we seek out new
innovations and innovative ways of working
with others across the Golden Triangle.
As we pursue our 2020 Vision goal of doubling
the size of our business over the course of
this decade, we know it will take next-level
creativity, partnerships, marketing, distribution
and marketplace execution. Achieving our
2020 Vision will also require us to operate
more sustainably. For our business. For our
stakeholders. And for the broader world beyond.