HOW EAST KILBRIDE IS PLAYING A VITAL ROLE IN DRIVING SKILLS AND SUSTAINABILITY IN SCOTLAND
By Jim Fox, Head of Public A airs for Coca-cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) in Great Britain, shares the latest business update from CCEP’S East Kilbride operations
In these turbulent times, with many still adjusting to the post-covid landscape and the cost-of-living crisis impacting so many, businesses like CCEP have an important role to play.
At CCEP we continue to work closely with our retail and supply chain partners to help our retail and hospitality customers and shoppers navigate these external headwinds. We’ve been an integral part of the Scottish economy for more than 100 years – and will continue to be as we face into the challenges ahead.
Committed to sustainability
Despite these challenges we remain firmly focused on the sustainability agenda. CCEP’S manufacturing site in East Kilbride has played a key role in many of the business’ major sustainability milestones over the years and continues to be at the forefront of our sustainable packaging innovations - whether that’s initiating production of our bottles made from 100% recycled plastic across our 500ml range, or leading on the transition from plastic to paper straws for our Capri-sun pouches.
Earlier this year, East Kilbride also became the first site to manufacture our brand-new 1.5L plastic bottles of Cocacola Zero Sugar, Diet Coke and Fanta with attached caps. This means that the lid remains attached to the bottle wherever it goes, preventing it from being discarded or thrown away separately. This makes it easier than before to recycle the entire bottle, ensuring that as much plastic as possible is captured and no caps get left behind, to help reduce litter.
Putting health at the forefront of our operations
As a major soft drinks supplier, we also recognise our role in helping the government’s efforts to improve the health of the nation, while continuing to offer consumers choice.
Coca-cola’s sugar reduction journey in GB began back in 1982, when we first brought Diet Coke to market. And since 2010 we’ve launched 100 new low or no sugar soft drinks and reformulated 47 of our products to contain less sugar. Since 2015 we have reduced our overall sugar use by 25%[1] and nearly all of our brands offer low or zero sugar variants alongside the originals.
Investing in people and in innovation
So much of this work to deliver a sustainable portfolio of great tasting drinks to retail customers and to shoppers is taking place right here in Scotland, the East Kilbride site is a fantastic example of how, step by step, we can help to deliver a big impact.
This has certainly been true for our recent milestone switch to attached caps. We overcame significant technical engineering challenges which wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work and determination of all colleagues involved. Our 200-strong workforce at the factory, from our early careers apprentices to our longest-serving colleagues, have demonstrated what can be achieved through collaboration.
And we’ll continue to back these efforts with ongoing investment into the innovation pipeline. We’ve invested £32million into our East Kilbride site since 2017, including in a number of important sustainability projects at the site as part of as part of a wider €250m investment programme launched by the business last year to support our ambition to be net zero by 2040. And investing in people is key to making these innovations happen – and to unlocking the future pipeline of talent. Our site in East Kilbride has been offering apprenticeships and benefitting from apprentices’ skills for over 20 years now. In fact, all of our Scottish apprentices have gone on to secure a full-time role with us, with an ever-broader range of roles available today.
Together with our colleagues, partners and customers, we’re doing all we can to create real, positive change in the areas we know we can have an impact. It’s what we’ve always strived to do and how we’ll continue to operate in the months and years ahead.
Using her legal background, Vasylenko realised that they were being denied their rights and started working to secure financial aid for them and their families.
“That was it,” she tells me. “Seeing and feeling that injustice, that was how my life plan changed course. The idea of public service really kicked in and I understood that it wasn’t something that came from the head, it came from the heart, and for me from then on, there was no escaping it.”
This political awakening was quickly followed, a few months later, by the Malaysian Airline Flight 17 – MH17 – being shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 by a Russian-made missile, killing 283 passengers including 80 children.
“Up to that point in time, just before MH17, I was thinking that as a family – because at that point it was just my husband and young son and I – that if things get bad, maybe we can, you know, move to another country, have our quiet, simple life, have normal jobs, but just live somewhere else. I was considering maybe the UK, but then when the plane was shot down with all these passengers, all these civilians killed, I realised that you could move anywhere you like, and then you can get on a civilian flight, and you’ll be just flying over Ukraine, or any part of the world where Russia’s operating its aggressive actions, and they’ll shoot down your plane, and you will never be safe, so there was no escape.
“That’s when the switch really went off in my head and it was extremely painful. I was crying so much for that MH17. But I was crying, you know, not just for the people, not just for the casualties, but for the inability to do anything. I felt powerless, that I had no control of the situation I was living in. And I really hated the feeling. I really, really, hated it. It was as if I was getting suffocated by something greater than me. And the bits of the puzzle started fitting together and I knew the only way to deal with it was to take some control.”
In 2015, having been joined by other lawyers working pro bono, she set up the Legal 100 which developed into an influential NGO, aiding servicemen and veterans, and which still exists today, offering a hotline for Ukrainians requiring legal advice. The Legal 100 pushed for the establishment of a separate government department for veterans and was involved in the appointment of ministers and key personnel. In 2016, Vasylenko was named by the Kyiv Post as one of the top 30 leaders under-30. And she says it almost became a natural step to become more politically active. She was elected in 2019 for the liberal Holos party, which she likens to the Liberal Democrats here. Her focus before the war was on climate change and although she is officially part of the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament, following the invasion in February, all MPS are now fully behind President Zelensky.
Vasylenko’s first-hand account of the conflict on Twitter is both hard-hitting and heart-breaking. Last week, she posted photographs of the burnt remains of 20 Ukrainian civilians, including 10 children, who had been targeted by the Russians as they fled the war. Previous posts spare nothing in their witness to the bloody brutality meted out by the Russian forces. And to the global leaders who she meets with regularly including the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, who have refused to back a no-fly zone over Ukraine, she has sent this stark message on social media: “DON’T YOU DARE look away from the consequences.”
For Vasylenko, the personal consequences of the war have meant being separated from her three children – eight-year-old Hryhoril, seven-year-old Kylyna and 15-month-old Sophia – who fled Ukraine with their father, Oleksandr, in March following warnings that she was on Russian hit lists. They are now living in the south of England with a host family while Vasylenko lives alone in their former family home.
“My life is changed completely – 180 degrees, but it’s not just me, it’s every single Ukrainian. It doesn’t matter who you were, a politician, a businessman, a teacher, a doctor, whether you were rich, poor, live in Kyiv, or in Kharkiv, your life changed 180 degrees, because each one of us has a different baseline from which we come. And, you know, I’m much more privileged, and much luckier than those people who have had their homes destroyed, who have lost family members and loved ones. I have nothing to complain about. But I have to deal with things that cause distress to my life, to my family’s life, to my children’s lives. And I don’t know what the long-term consequences of all of this will be.”
Vasylenko calls the children every day and speaks to them on Facetime, but she says every call leaves her more broken. “My youngest, who is now walking and starting to speak, tries to grab the phone from the other kids. And all she’s saying is ‘Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama…’ and she’s clearly aching to be closer and doesn’t understand why there’s this screen. And you know, that’s when I just break down into tears, because that’s impossible. There’s nothing you can do. There are thousands of miles which separate you, you are here doing what you have chosen to do, really, and again, I come back to the fact that it’s a choice and everything in this life is a choice. And I have made this one.
“Technically, I could stop, by using maternity leave or the exemption from military service and so on, those choices, they are all there, all options, and all legal. They’re all very much explainable and understandable. But I must be honest, I love what I do. And I see that I have benefitted my country in many ways. And it’s not because I’m amazing or the best or, you know, I’m so arrogant in terms of thinking of my abilities, it’s just because I did what others weren’t making the choice to do.
“To be honest, I don’t think that I would be a very good mother right now, in the traditional sense, because all my thoughts are constantly with Ukraine but there will come a time when I have to choose and that time could be very soon because my kids said to me, in the last phone call, that they had had enough of this – ‘we want to go home, why are you home, why are we not home?’. The maximum [amount of time] we’re going to take this, my son says, is until his birthday. His birthday is the 30th of October. He’s like, after that, ‘take me out of here’. He’s nearly hysterical. And you know, my daughter saying to me, ‘I want my toys. I want my room.’ And I understand them.
And I’m saying to them, ‘that you realise that if I bring you back here, for example, I’ll be still doing the travelling because it’s part of my work.’ And they say to me, ‘okay, we’re fine with that.’ And their schoolteacher, here in Ukraine, who has known them for all their lives, I spoke to her, and she said to me that they used to say these things all the time that their mom is a public figure, and she travels so much, and spends so little time with us. They never say this to me, they say it to their teachers and their nannies, but never to me, until this conversation we had last week.”
I ask Vasylenko if she is more frightened by the immediate threats of the war or the long-term effect that being absent from her children could have on them, given how her own relationship with her father was affected by his absence. She thinks for some time.
“I think the difference is that my father wouldn’t have believed he was doing anything wrong because he was doing what he did for a greater good. That put him on the moral high-ground, and it still does. I addressed this very question to him yesterday because I am now the one experiencing guilt about the choices I have made about being here while my children and husband are elsewhere. But he simply doesn’t understand it because he believes in something greater than self, so he has no time for my guilt, he thinks that it is self-indulgent.
“And yes, of course, I see the parallels now with my father and the danger of history repeating itself and because I’m a person who also believes a lot in karma and energy cycles, and all of that – which some people may find crazy – I would say that the situation in which I am in, it’s just trying to teach me something, and every day I wake up and I’m making a choice either to be with my country, or with my children. I also know that I need to find some balance soon for all our sakes. But you know, Ukraine took a deep intake of breath on the 24th of February this year and we are waiting to be able to exhale and breathe normally.” •