Driving sustainability: Coca-Cola India and Reliance Retail join forces to promote PET recycling

INDIA – Coca-Cola India and Reliance Retail have collaborated on a groundbreaking sustainability initiative called ‘Bhool Na Jana, Plastic Bottle Lautana,’ focusing on the collection and recycling of used PET bottles through Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) and collection bins.

This pilot project, aligned with the government’s Swachh Bharat Mission and envisioning a circular economy, has commenced in 36 Reliance Retail stores in Mumbai and Delhi, including Smart Bazaar and Sahakari Bhandar outlets.

The initiative, set to expand to 200 Reliance Retail stores nationwide by 2025, aims to collect 500,000 PET bottles annually during the pilot phase.

Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) and collection bins will be installed in participating stores, providing consumers with a convenient method to deposit used PET bottles.

In return, consumers will receive attractive discounts on Coca-Cola India products. The collected PET bottles will be responsibly managed and recycled by Reliance Industries, a leader in polyester and plastics recycling.

Damodar Mall, Chief Executive Officer, Grocery Retail, Reliance Retail Limited, highlighted the cultural inclination of Indian families to recycle, stating “Indian families have had the habit of not trashing milk pouches, plastic bottles, even newspapers, daily.

“We clean, collect them, and hand them over to raddiwalas (scrap dealers), who in today’s world are the unique front-end army of recyclers.Z

The initiative aligns with Coca-Cola’s global commitment to collect and recycle 100% of the packaging it produces, supporting its World Without Waste strategy.

This initiative follows a similar partnership Coca-Cola had with the 10-Min grocery delivery service, Zepto, last year, to establish a plastic waste management initiative that will organize the process of collecting PET bottles with 100 percent traceability.

The ‘return and recycle’ initiative for PET bottles is an extension of The Coca-Cola Company’s global goal of creating a World Without Waste by finding solutions to global challenges of packaging waste and is focused on three core pillars.

The pillars include designing all primary consumer packaging to be recyclable by 2025 & using 50% recycled material in all packaging by 2030; Collecting and recycling a bottle or can for everyone the company sells by 2030; Partner: Bringing people together to support a healthy, debris-free environment.

In line with this vision, the company’s partnership with Zepto in India intends to create a circular economy for plastic by connecting all participants in the PET recycling value chain.

In the first-of-its-kind initiative, Coca-Cola India will leverage the Zepto two-wheeler distribution network to ‘collect back’ empty PET bottles of any brand from consumers.

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