Living Green

Coke pledges push to cut global warming impact

BEIJING — The Coca-Cola Co. pledged Tuesday to reduce its carbon footprint by buying 100,000 beverage coolers fitted with new environment friendly technologies.

Speaking at a lecture in Beijing organized by the environmental group Greenpeace, Neville Isdell, chief executive officer of the Atlanta-based beverage giant, said the company would "purchase and deploy" by 2010 refrigerators and vending machines cooled by compressed carbon dioxide rather than hydrofluorocarbons.

Better known as HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons are pound for pound more than 1,000 times more potent when it comes to global warming, he said.

"We cannot wait for consumers or governments or technologies or price to move us towards sustainable solutions . . . so we're doing what we can within our own business," Isdell said.

Greenpeace organized the conference to highlight the connection between refrigerants and global warming, the heating of the planet as gasses absorb reflected energy.

Gases escaping from air conditioners and refrigerators currently account for about 2 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. But because HFCs trap more heat than carbon dioxide and other man-made gasses, their impact could rise to 8.6 percent by 2050, Greenpeace said.

"Compared to other parts of the climate change problem, (refrigerants) are eminently solvable," said Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International.

Coke has invested $40 million to research refrigerator technologies less damaging to the environment. The Atlanta-based company announced last year that it would use HFC-free refrigerators during the Beijing Olympics.

A recent internal audit of Coke's carbon footprint — the amount of greenhouse gases it releases to the atmosphere — showed that 10 million coolers and vending machines the company operates worldwide represented "our largest single impact on global warming," Isdell said.

But because the newer refrigerators cost roughly 25 percent more than the current standard, few companies have been willing to upgrade their equipment.

"It's very difficult for companies like ours to buy more climate-friendly coolers until the price comes down, but the price won't come down until other companies, other than us, buy more," Isdell said.

He added that the purchase of 100,000 units "will be the largest deployment of this new technology by anyone by a very, very long shot."

Coke, Unilever and McDonalds launched Refrigerants Naturally, an industry coalition to phase out HFCs, in 2004.

Leipold praised Coke executives for those initiatives.

"We're happy that companies like Coca-Cola are taking the lead in tackling the climate change problem related to refrigeration and cooling because we need big boys like Coke to take the lead," he said.

But Leipold called for a more rapid shift to new technologies. Because Coke buys 1 million new refrigerator units annually, the company "needs to do much more" and should commit to replacing older coolers by the middle of 2012, he said.

The market may push Coke and other beverage makers. In Europe, several major supermarket chains have begun requiring that all coolers be "HFC-free," said Bryan Jacob, an environmental technologies manager for Coke in Atlanta.

"There's a consumer expectation, so those retailers are demanding the change," he said.

The announcement dovetails with recent efforts by Coca-Cola to cultivate an image as a conservation-minded company.

Last year, Isdell pledged that the company would become "the most efficient user of water amongst our peer companies." On Tuesday, he said that Coke bottling plants in China reduced the amount of water required to produce a liter of beverage by 8 percent last year.

Some environmental groups have said Coke executives should do more to conserve water.

A report released in January by The Energy and Resources Institute, an independent research organization based in New Delhi, India, found that two Coke bottling plants were operating in areas where groundwater supplies were "overexploited" and one of the factories had "significant impacts" on local water supplies. But the report said the company generally met government regulatory standards on the level of pollutants in wastewater.

On Tuesday, Leipold called on Coke to "put further efforts into addressing the company's other environmental challenges" including "water problems identified in India."