EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) has a 120-year history of being a good corporate citizen around the world.
The global scale of the Coca-Cola System, executed in a highly localized manner, makes it important for us
to stimulate economic growth, strengthen communities, and protect and preserve the environment
everywhere we do business in order to achieve our own sustainable growth.
In 2005, the newly appointed CEO of TCCC, Neville Isdell, announced our new corporate strategy, the
Manifesto for Growth, which was developed by a worldwide leadership team representing all geographies
and functions within the Company. This strategy integrates the core values of sustainable development into
our overall growth strategy. The Manifesto for Growth envisions TCCC achieving sustainable growth through
five areas -- Profit, People, Portfolio, Partners, and Planet. In addition to maintaining the profitability and
quality of our diverse brands, the Manifesto challenges us to be the best global citizen, collaborating with our
stakeholders and empowering our people. The Manifesto underscores the interdependence of our own
success as a corporation with our success in becoming a change agent and leader for sustainability.
TCCC has organized its sustainability plans around:
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Developing mechanisms for governance, stakeholder engagement, and communications that
emphasize collaboration and transparency;
Focusing on key initiatives that target sustainable development challenges closest to our business;
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Establishing explicit sustainability goals that push us toward becoming an international leader in
sustainable development
Coca-Cola’s approach to managing our operations in an ethical, holistic manner is built upon
Citizenship@Coca-Cola, a program we developed with our largest bottling partners in 2002.
Citizenship@Coca-Cola describes our core commitments, principles, standards, and policies that guide not
only our own behavior but also those of our major bottling partners.
With so many challenges to achieving economic, social, and environmental sustainability, The Coca-Cola
Company chose to target its efforts on three key initiatives: water, sustainable packaging and health and
wellness. These three challenges were selected because TCCC has unique skills that can successfully
address these problems and they are also issues that are directly relevant to our business. For water,
packaging, and health and wellness we have formulated strategies to tackle these problems from multiple
perspectives, ranging from how we operate internally to how we target our philanthropic efforts and work with
others to leverage our internal expertise and our global presence to address these issues. Efforts on the
ground in all three areas are already underway; and TCCC is committed to sustain our leadership to these
focal areas to ensure lasting results.
The Coca-Cola Company recognizes that we must constantly stretch ourselves toward more ambitious, more
challenging goals to maintain industry leadership in sustainable development and pursue our own corporate
strategy. To that end, TCCC continuously sets explicit goals in our environmental performance, particularly
around water, energy and climate protection, and packaging. In 2005, our plants used 1% less total water
than we did in 2000, even while our production volume is 35% larger than it was in 2000. Additionally, TCCC
sets goals to improve our impact on the communities where we operate and within the workplace, including
the workplaces of our suppliers, as described in our Supplier Guiding Principles. We measure our
performance against these criteria and share highlights of our actions in our annual Environmental and
Citizenship reports. Since publishing our first Environmental Report in 2002, year-over-year we have
achieved higher efficiencies in our System’s water, energy, and solid waste management.
We also know that sustainable development for the Company and for the planet will require innovative
science, technology, and management practices. In 2004 TCCC established The Beverage Institute for
Health and Wellness to support a key sustainability initiative, health and wellness. The Institute’s objective
is to build scientific expertise on the wellness needs of consumers. Institute research informs TCCC’s
understanding of emerging wellness trends and ingredients, and helps us ensure we are involved with
innovative, cutting-edge research in nutrition. 1.3 billion times a day, someone drinks one of our beverages,
which include more than 2400 different products to meet different consumer needs, including carbonated soft
drinks, water, coffee, sports drinks, and fruit juices. Though our consumers have varied health and wellness
needs, TCCC is working to help our consumers make informed decisions to manage personal health,
through the breadth of our current portfolio offerings and research into future possibilities.
The Coca-Cola Company seeks not only to run our business on the principles of sustainability but also to
work with other international leaders to tackle sustainability challenges. TCCC collaborates with government
agencies such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations (UN), United States Agency for
International Development, and local governments, major NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace,
Conservation International and Business for Social Responsibility, and other multinationals like Cargill, Dow,
McDonald’s, Unilever, and Proctor & Gamble to seek collaborative, integrated solutions. TCCC recently
joined the UN’s Global Compact to demonstrate our commitment to upholding the Compact’s ten principles
on human rights, environmental protection, and economic development consistent with the UN’s Millennium
Development Goals.
We know that our size and scope give us an opportunity to lead business toward more sustainable practices;
and we’ve worked to effect industry-level changes on global sustainability issues, such as our commitment to
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hydrofluorocarbon-free refrigeration to meet our climate and greenhouse gas goals. Refrigeration equipment
is one of the largest drivers of greenhouse gas emissions for the food and beverage sector; so TCCC has
pro-actively addressed this impact by committing to purchasing HFC-free insulation for all new refrigeration
equipment. Beyond our own commitment we also co-founded an industry alliance with McDonald’s and
Unilever - “Refrigerants, Naturally,” to lead the transformation of the food and beverage sector toward
more climate-neutral, environmentally sustainable technologies.
While TCCC is addressing several sustainable development challenges, we are most proud of our signature
contribution, Global Water Stewardship (GWS). Water is essential for life; and The Coca-Cola Company is
committed to preserving and protecting water resources community by community where we operate. GWS’s
major strengths are its integrated approach to tackling water issues, the analytical rigor we use to inform our
actions, and the top-of-mind awareness achieved throughout all levels of the Company and the bottling
system regarding the importance of water stewardship. The GWS strategy encompasses a global focus on
international leadership to raise awareness and a local focus on our own operations and the communities
around them. Our four-fold strategy involves:
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Becoming best-in-class at water management – both in water use efficiency and wastewater
management
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Helping ensure access to clean drinking water in underserved communities where we operate
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Supporting the protection of watersheds in water-stressed communities where we operate
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Helping mobilize the international community to drive global awareness and action around water
challenges
Our best-in-class commitment and performance on sustainability and corporate responsibility have been
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recognized by numerous 3 party reviewers, such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for North America,
FTSE4GOOD, the Global 100, GES Investment Services in Northern Europe, and Innovest. Additionally The
Coca-Cola Company was honored as the best Food and Beverage company in Financial Times’ 2004
Survey of the “World’s Most Respected Companies,” the Award for Business Excellence in the Community
by the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, and the Roberts Environmental Center’s top score for
Transparency in Sustainability Reporting. This external recognition demonstrates TCCC’s benchmark
performance as a corporate leader in sustainable development.
We are committed to being at the leading edge of environmental, social, and economic sustainable
development, both in how we work now and how we plan for our future. We still have a long way to go, but
The Coca-Cola Company is deeply committed to the journey.
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Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are a potent greenhouse gas.