A world where great packaging never becomes waste.
We believe in providing packaging choices that reduce environmental impact, and always make sure our packaging doesn’t become waste. This means innovating to give shoppers and consumers a wide range of options – from sustainable plastic or aluminium packaged drinks in multiple formats, to flavouring billions of water occasions from small bottles or cartons with concentrated squashes and syrups, to products with no packaging at all.
All our packaging and advertising have prominent messages encouraging consumers to recycle. Find out more about different kinds of packaging and where it can be recycled.
Where packaging is necessary, we aim to establish a fully closed loop system where all bottles and cans are repeatedly used and recycled. As part of this ambition, we have made sure all bottles and cans in Great Britain and Ireland are fully recyclable and where possible, we reduce our packaging through design. In Brazil this year, all 500ml PET bottles have been lightweighted while further lightweighting has been made to the secondary packing boxes of our 180ml and 200ml juice cartons.
Our aim is to increase recyclability across our packaging. This year, 99.6% is recyclable in Great Britain and Ireland - with only our bag in box connectors and drops dispensers currently outstanding.
We actively support the roll out of well-designed Deposit Return Schemes (DRS) to increase recycling rates and establish a functioning circular economy for plastic. This needs to happen so we have sufficient supplies of recycled food-grade quality PET to re-use in our bottles.
In Great Britain, we welcomed the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) to our Beckton site in January, to bring to life the impacts of DRS, complexities and the importance of industry-government collaboration. In Ireland, a DRS is due to go live in February 2024. We are highly supportive and are championing the integration of soft drinks containers into the circular economy, with Kevin Donnelly, Britvic Ireland’s Managing Director, serving as a Non-Executive Director on the Re-turn board.
A well-designed Deposit Return Scheme would help us increase the level of recycled plastic (rPET) in our plastic bottles in Great Britain and Ireland. Currently, Ballygowan Mineral Water and Plenish bottles are made from 100% rPET.
Through working with suppliers and technical teams the total percentage of rPET in our bottles across Great Britain and Ireland has increased from 22% to 26%. Our biggest challenge to reaching our longer-term target is the availability of high quality food-grade rPET sourced from places that meet our required technical and ethical standards and balance carbon impact.
Meanwhile in Brazil, we partner with eureciclo to meet our legal requirement to recover at least the equivalent of 22% of packaging that we place on the market. We are going beyond this and are recovering all packaging we sell to our customers.
We’re making the most of our flavour concentration expertise to create more choice across our much-loved Robinsons and Teisseire ranges. Each bottle of these family favourites is enough to flavour 20-40 drinks, depending on the bottle size and that doubles with our double concentrated range. This expertise means we’re leading the way when it comes to maximising the number of serves per packaged item.
Our R&D team is developing innovative ways to serve high quality drinks without the need for unnecessary single-use packaging – an initiative we call Beyond the Bottle.
For decades, we’ve been experts at serving delicious drinks on dispense in hospitality settings and we’ve been increasing the number of outlets using this model – for example our recent contract with the O2 Arena in London. More recently, our experts have been pioneering new forms of technology to create additional premium serve options. We have created our London Essence Freshly Infused founts – the first premium tonic on tap. It uses patented micro-dosing technology to freshly infuse tonic water with distilled botanicals at the point of serve, so there is no need for packaging.
This, year, installations of our London Essence Freshly Infused founts in hospitality venues across Great Britain have continued to grow with over 1,450 taps now in place, up 49% on last year. The brand has also collaborated with spirit brand Avallen Calvados and spirits distribution system EcoSpirits to create the ultra-low waste Sustainable Spritz, which eliminates the need for single-use glass. Soda from our freshly infused dispense system is blended with EcoSpirits’ drinks from a reusable ‘EcoTote’, eliminating the need for packaging.
Britvic is a founding signatory of The UK Plastics Pact. The Pact is a pioneering agreement to transform the plastic packaging system in the UK and keep plastic in the economy and out of the environment. The Pact brings together manufacturers, retailers, recyclers, non-governmental organisations and the UK government in a unique and bold collaboration to tackle the growing issue of plastic waste.
The Pact’s members have committed to four ambitious targets by 2025:
- Eliminate problematic or unnecessary single-use packaging through redesign, innovation or alternative (reuse) delivery model.
- 100% of plastics packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable.
- 70% of plastics packaging effectively recycled or composted.
- 30% average recycled content across all plastic packaging.
Through this Pact, we are engaging with partners across the full plastic value chain to play our part in creating a circular economy for plastics and a healthier planet.
