Water

It is our core priority to minimise the impact of our business on the environment. With a growing global population and fast moving economy, the demand for natural resources increases. The availability of fresh water is also heavily affected by factors such as climate change.

Our operations and our ability to grow depend on the availability and quality of local water resources. This is why our major focus is set on water stewardship efforts. We've adopted an integrated approach to this critical resource:

• Improving our water efficiency: we adopt technologies that help us reduce the amount of water needed to produce our beverages
• Working in partnerships: to protect local watersheds and promote sustainable water management, we work in a growing number of partnerships

Improving water efficiency

All our three plants, in Ploiesti, Timisoara and Poiana Negrii have achieved the Water Alliance for Stewardship Gold Medal - the most important certification for plants aiming to reach top performances in reducing water consumption. In all our plants we keep a close track of the water we use. To improve our water efficiency, we decided to incorporate water saving technologies in the production lines, which lead to important improvement:

• We use dry lubrication technology which eliminates substantial water consumption, due to the use of a special gel to help transport PETs on our bottling lines
• We apply ionised air technology, which rinses PET bottles, instead of water

We ensure that all water returned to the natural environment is treated to a level that supports aquatic life. Our three bottling plants in Romania all have on-site wastewater treatment plants. In Ploiesti, we have made a significant investment in water recycling by using sand filters in the water treatment room. Thanks to the technology we use, treated water released into the environment is suitable for use in agriculture as well as supporting plant and aquatic life.

Our global system is becoming more efficient in its water use by reducing the amount it uses per litre of product produced, even as production volume increases. In Romania, we're committed to strengthening our progress every year:

• In 2020 we reduced our Water Ratio by 2 % since 2019 (1.57L) due to water use optimization and water saving projects.

Performance on reducing water usage ratio (litre/litre of beverage produced)

Our top 3 initiatives to reduce water waste:

• • In April 2019, Coca-Cola HBC Romania launched a new water bottling line at the plant in Poiana Negrii, with a maximum capacity of producing 1.3 million litres of water per day. It has a bottling capacity 44% higher than the previous one, at the same time maintaining energy consumption at the same level, due to better energy efficiency. Moreover, this investment results in a 6% decrease in the amount of water used during the production.
  
• Treatment of effluents from waste water recovery plant in Ploiesti, an investment of €200,000 that allows the wastewater to be treated and reused as clean water for the cooling installation at Co-Generation Plant (CHP).
• Reuse of backwash water from sand filters. We recover large water quantities, which after the pre-treatment phase are pumped again in the water treatment system.
• Clean-in-Place matrix optimisation. By optimising sequences, various steps duration and measurements we reduced significantly water, energy, chemicals used for CIP as well as production time.