Artists impression of the Rotterdam site
Coca-Cola Company subsidiary claims factory will be world-leading on sustainability
Smoothie brand Innocent has announced it is to open an "all-electric" factory in Rotterdam next year that it claims will be the most sustainable facility of its type in the world.
The drinks firm unveiled plans for the "carbon neutral" factory late last week, as it announced it was bringing forward its corporate goal to achieve carbon neutrality across its business and supply chain by five years to 2025.
Innocent said the new facility, dubbed 'The Blender', would play a major role in delivering on the company's new emissions goals, noting that it will run on 100 per cent renewable energy, be equipped with on-site renewables, and rely on shipments delivered by two 50-tonne all-electric HGVs.
The site is being built to meet BREEAM sustainability certification standards and will use a system where energy generated from cooling the factory is re-used for heating so as to reduce its energy consumption by 45 per cent, the company said. It added that The Blender had been designed to reduce water usage by 75 per cent, and said it expected it to consume 28 per cent less energy than comparable facilities.
The company also announced it expected the new facility to help it reach 100 per cent renewable energy across its drinks production facilities by 2023, up from 86 per cent today.
Innocent CEO Douglas Lamont said the new factory and climate goal were an important "stepping stone" for the company, which has signed up to the Business Ambition for 1.5C initiative.
"We know that our [climate' pledge must be backed by a strong roadmap to ensure that we are taking the right action to rapidly reduce our footprint on our way to net zero, but believe that investing in becoming carbon neutral by 2025 through nature-based solutions is a ‘belt and braces' approach consistent with our purpose."
The company also pointed to plans to ramp up the amount of recycled and plant-based plastic in its bottles by 2025 and reiterated that it was lobbying in favour of "quality" deposit return schemes that would boost recycling rates of its bottles.
The announcement comes after the drinks company launched a new Farmer Innovation Fund that aims to find innovative carbon reduction projects and boost awareness of sustainable agriculture practices among its suppliers.
The climate announcements come as Innocent's parent company, the Coca-Cola Company, has been ranked the world's top polluter for the fourth year in a row in a scorecard published by the Break Free From Plastic campaign.
The results of a worldwide plastic audit, published this morning, reveal that Coca-Cola produces more plastic than the next top two polluters combined, which were identified as PepsiCo and Unilever.
