To mark the World Environment Day on June 5, Coca-Cola in Nepal along with its sustainability partners have come together to pledge a ‘World without Waste’.
At a press conference held in Kathmandu, Coca-Cola Nepal highlighted the joint efforts of all the stakeholders involved to achieve its waste management efforts.
“World Without Waste (WWW) is Coca-Cola’s commitment to collect and recycle the equivalent of 100% of the packaging it sells by 2030. To achieve this, the company will continue to focus on designing its packaging to be 100% recyclable across its expanding portfolio, while partnering with local communities, NGOs, industry, and consumers to collect and recycle packaging, helping ensure it doesn’t end up where it doesn’t belong,” states the company.
During the conference, Sundeep Bajoria, Vice President Operations, South West Asia at Coca-Cola remarked, “One of the better ways to celebrate the World Environment Day is through self-assessment of our individual footprints on the environment and what measures are we taking individually and collectively to stay on the side of solutions rather than that of the problems.”
Under its ‘World Without Waste’ vision, the company is said to be encouraging self-sustaining ventures with decentralized waste management and building new infrastructure for material recovery including PET and composting of wet waste.
Coca-Cola in Nepal along with its bottling partner Bottlers Nepal Limited recently has partnered with Nepal Army, Central, Provincial and local government, Nepal Mountaineering Association and SPCC in the largest ever joint initiative made to retrieve discarded garbage from Mt. Everest.
Furthermore, Coca-Cola in Nepal has also announced its partnerships for 2 PET recycling projects – Nagarmitra and Recycler Saathi. As a PET recycling initiative, a cooperation agreement was signed among Coca-Cola, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH-Germany (German Development Organization), Ganesha Ecosphere Limited-India (One of the biggest PET recycler in India) and Himalayan Climate Initiative –Nepal to establish and run a project –PET bottle re-collection system Nepal- Greening Kathmandu-Establishing a legal, responsible and environment friendly PET recollection system.
Similarly, for the new PET recycling project with Creasion as the implementing partner, an MOU was signed between Aanand Mishra, CEO of Creasion and Mr. Ambuj Singh, Country Director, Coca-Cola in Nepal and Mr. Pradip Pandey of Bottlers Nepal Limited.
Coca-Cola plans to invest substantially in the project to provide momentum to its existing PET waste recovery efforts in Nepal. In partnership with Creasion, the project aims to collaborate with the local municipality, business establishments, citizens & waste pickers to emulate a multi stakeholder approach towards finding a solution to recycle PET waste in Nepal.