Coke does its bit for conservation
726M LITRES OF WATER IN PAST SIX YEARS Soft drink company exceeds target of a 20% reduction by 2020.
Amid the crippling drought in the Western Cape and with stringent water-saving measures being introduced, every drop counts and Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa (CCBSA) yesterday highlighted its own efforts which it said had resulted in a saving of more than 700 million litres of water in recent years in its soft drink production processes.
Amalgamated Beverage Industries (ABI), now known as CCBSA, one of South Africa’s largest bottlers, set a target in 2010 to reduce the amount of water it uses in its soft drink production by 20% by the year 2020.
The company announced that it had exceeded its target by almost four years. By the end of 2016, it had managed a 30% reduction in water usage.
CCBSA said it had saved 726 million litres of water over the past six years, the equivalent of around 290 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or enough to supply almost 8 000 households for a year with 250 litres per day.
CCBSA said the illustrative example of this was the amount of water used to produce one litre of soft drink, which in 2010 required 2.13 litres of water. By last year, this had been reduced to 1.7 litres and, of this amount, one litre of water went into the soft drink itself, while the remaining 700 millilitres was used in the bottling process and recycled where possible.
Minister of Water and Sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane was yesterday set to visit the infrastructure installed by CCBSA that reduces water usage at the company’s Appletiser production plant in Elgin in the Western Cape.
“In a country like South Africa, where water resources are severely limited and increasingly constrained, water savings initiatives can no longer be an occasional add-on to existing business practices. We need to interrogate where, how and why we use water in our daily operations,” said managing director of CCBSA Velaphi Ratshefola.
“This is the approach we took in looking to save water in our production process and discovered that CCBSA could save more than just a little water – we could fundamentally reduce our water consumption and our dependence on an increasingly scarce resource.”
CCBSA said it achieved the water savings through implementing a number of advanced technologies. It added that the use of anaerobic digesters allowed for the more efficient recycling of waste water which resulted in cleaner water being available for other uses, while performance trackers had been installed to ensure that savings were maintained. – ANA