Coca-Cola Give World Wildlife Fund Another $3.75M Extending Partnership To Protect Freshwater Resources

October 30, 2008 1:58 p.m. EST

Atlanta, GA (AHN) - Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. has extended its partnership with the environmental organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to protect freshwater resources, the duo announced Thursday.

The partnership aims to help Coke improve its efficiency at using water in its operations, system-wide, and also to reduce carbon emissions from its operations, while promoting sustainable agricultural practices and helping to conserve the world's most important freshwater basins, Coke and WWF said in a statement Thursday.

"Our sustainability as a business demands a relentless focus on efficiency in our use of natural resources," Coca-Cola Company President and CEO Muhtar Kent said.

WWF-U.S.President and CEO Carter Roberts said that conservation was "imperative" to solving the world's water and climate crisis.

"In this resource constrained world, successful businesses will find ways to achieve growth while using fewer resources," Roberts said.

Coca-Cola has extended the partnership until 2012 and has given the WWF another $3.75 million, in addition to the $20 million it gave the WWF when the pair formed the partnership in 2007.

Coca-Cola also joined WWF's Climate Savers program, leading corporations around the world will manage to collectively cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 14 million tons annually by 2010, which is the equivalent of taking more than 3 million cars off the road each year.

Coke has set a goal of cutting its water usage at its bottling plants world-wide by 20 percent of its 2004 use by 2012, which equates to saving 50 billion liters of water a year in 2012.

It will also work with WWF to promote sustainable agricultural practices in its food supply chain beginning with sugarcane.

Improving agricultural practices for sugarcane would be a good start, as it can negatively affect freshwater resources near the fields.

Sugarcane farmers have been criticized for using so much water in South Florida and for the fertilizer that has run off of their fields into the Everglades, destroying much of the natural habitat there.