How Green is Coke?

Last week, I posted about the new t-shirts made from recycled Coke bottles that are on sale at Wal-Mart. I was talking to a friend today at lunch about whether this effort of Coke's was truly green or just a matter of greenwashing.

According to GreenBiz.com, Coke is pretty serious about the environment.

Inside Coke, a team of a half dozen or so environmental advocates, led by a former Clinton administration official named Jeff Seabright, operate almost as an in-house NGO. They get high marks from outsiders who work with the company. "The inspiration and the perspiration are real," says Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace USA.

Coke has good business reasons to take sustainability seriously. Its brand is all-important. It depends on clean water, a scarce resource. And the company has been stung by alleged misdeeds. Although no one ever proved a connection, a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Kerala, India, was shut down in 2004 after nearby wells went dry. That fed into a global anti-Coke campaign that caused about 20 colleges, including the University of Michigan and NYU, to suspend the sale of Coca-Cola products, albeit temporarily.

For all those reasons, Isdell has made the environment a touchstone of his four-year tenure as CEO. Coke's sales, profits and stock price have all grown since he came out of retirement to take over; he will turn the chief executive's job over to Muhtar Kent in July, and remain chairman for another year. Under Isdell, Coke has set bold environmental goals -- to become "water neutral," to come up with a sustainable package for its beverages and to help curb climate change.

Read the full article here.