Coca-Cola in Hong Kong, represented by The Coca-Cola Company and its bottling partner Swire Coca-Cola in the city, announced today a significant leap forward in its commitment to helping Hong Kong reduce beverage packaging waste with a more well-designed approach: becoming the first in the metropolis to recycle locally collected plastic bottles into new ones leveraging the advanced recycling facility supported by the Coca-Cola System in Hong Kong.
“Every locally produced 500ml Coca-Cola® Trademark beverage or bonaqua® water (1.5L or below) you enjoy, there’s a good chance the bottle is now made from locally recycled plastic,” shared Karlijn in t Veld, Vice-President of Operations for Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Mongolia at the Coca-Cola Company. “This isn’t just about refreshing the world; it’s about making a tangible difference for a better Hong Kong, one bottle at a time.”
This holistic local approach is vital for Hong Kong, which faces unique challenges in managing beverage packaging waste. It is made possible by the significant investment by Swire Coca-Cola, one of the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottlers, in New Life Plastics Limited (NLP).
As Hong Kong’s first food-grade-ready plastic bottle recycling facility, NLP is designed to process up to 2 million plastic beverage bottles daily. However, it currently processes less than 800,000 daily, highlighting the critical need for increased collection efforts from the community.
A recent Coca-Cola Hong Kong survey of 1,125 local consumers sheds light on the public’s recycling habits and the challenges that Hong Kong faces in its recycling efforts, thus underscoring that while Hong Kongers are willing to recycle, with 67.29% saying they “are already trying to recycle as much as possible”, they need more accessible infrastructure.
The survey revealed that the top challenge for recycling is “insufficient or inconvenient recycling infrastructure” (77.16%). Many also expressed concern that “recyclables are not properly processed” (24.09%).
Consumer preference for sustainable products is clear, with 63.56% prioritising environmentally friendly packaging and 80.98% indicating that manufacturers’ sustainability efforts increase consumers’ purchase intent.
Over the years, Coca-Cola in Hong Kong has continued to increase the use of recycled material in its primary packaging, while also achieving many other packaging innovation milestones
