The Coca-Cola Company, which produces billions of bottles and cans each year, announced a new set of environmental goals for 2035, reflecting shifts in its approach to sustainability. These new targets revise earlier commitments across packaging, water stewardship, and carbon emissions. It marks a recalibration of the company’s long-term environmental strategy.
While some objectives remain steadfast, others have been scaled back or removed altogether. As such, Coca-Cola has come under fire from environmental groups for scaling back its carbon emissions and other sustainability commitments.
Here are the company’s new sustainability targets, as outlined in its updated environmental goals.
Climate Action: A New Approach to Carbon Emissions
The beverage giant has set a goal to reach net zero by 2050, while Coca-Cola in Europe has a more ambitious target of achieving it by 2040.
The company has revised its climate targets. Its previous goal was to cut absolute carbon emissions by 25% by 2030, based on a 2015 baseline. The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) classified this target as aligned with a 2°C global warming trajectory.
The updated 2035 goal, however, no longer includes an absolute emissions reduction target. Instead, Coca-Cola aims to reduce Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in line with a 1.5°C trajectory, using 2019 as a baseline.
While this change aligns with more ambitious climate scenarios, it lacks specific percentage reductions previously outlined. This shift raises questions about Coca-Cola’s commitment to ambitious climate action, especially as the 2015 Paris Agreement calls for significant reductions to limit global warming.
As stated in the company’s 2023 environmental update, Coca-Cola has made progress in reducing its absolute carbon emissions based on original targets:
- 8% decline in absolute emissions against a 2015 baseline.
- Systemwide renewable electricity use up 24% in 2023, from 21% in 2022.
Below is the company’s greenhouse gas emissions for three years. Both Scopes 1 and 2 have decreased in 2023 compared to 2021. But Scope 3 emissions (value chain emissions) have increased.
Packaging Goals: A Shift in Focus
In 2023, Coca-Cola’s operations generated nearly 6 million tonnes of packaging. These include 137 billion plastic bottles and 74 billion aluminum and steel cans, according to company data. This is why the company must focus on this sustainability area.
Packaging has been a cornerstone of Coca-Cola’s sustainability efforts, particularly through its 2018 “World Without Waste” initiative. This program set ambitious goals:
- Ensuring all packaging is 100% recyclable by 2025,
- Using at least 50% recycled content by 2030, and
- Collecting a bottle or can for every one sold by 2030.
In 2022, Coca-Cola added a goal for 25% of its beverages to be sold in refillable containers globally.
In its latest update, Coca-Cola reported significant progress toward making all packaging recyclable, with 90% already meeting this standard. However, the company acknowledged falling short on other packaging goals.
- The recycled content target has been reduced from 50% by 2030 to a new range of 35%-40% by 2035. Similarly, its collection goal has been adjusted to 70%-75% by 2035, down from 100% by 2030.
The company also removed its goal for refillable packaging, explaining that it will focus on areas with existing infrastructure for reusable containers. Instead, Coca-Cola plans to prioritize increasing recycled content in primary packaging and improving collection rates.
Its revised efforts will center on two key pillars:
- “Design,” which involves creating packaging that is fully recyclable, and
- “Partner to Collect,” emphasizing advocacy for well-designed collection systems and investments in local recycling infrastructure.
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The soda manufacturer also made significant changes in its water use and agricultural sourcing.
Water Stewardship: A Broadened Commitment
Water management remains a critical component of Coca-Cola’s sustainability framework. The company reaffirmed its commitment to replenish more than 100% of the water used in its finished products globally, a milestone it has consistently achieved since 2015.
- Additionally, Coca-Cola expanded its focus on water in high-risk locations. Previously, the goal was to return 100% of water used in 175 high-risk sites by 2030.
Now, the target encompasses all high-risk locations—more than 200 sites—by 2035. This broader commitment reflects the company’s growing emphasis on supporting local ecosystems and communities where water resources are under stress.
Agriculture and Sustainable Sourcing
- Coca-Cola has removed its goal to source 100% of its priority agricultural ingredients according to its Principles for Sustainable Agriculture.
Despite this, the company pledged to continue working with suppliers and third-party stakeholders to advance sustainable sourcing practices. Efforts will focus on reducing water use, lowering emissions, preventing deforestation, and conserving high-risk areas in its supply chain.
From Ambition to Adjustment: A Strategic Recalibration
Coca-Cola considered these adjustments a strategic recalibration based on decades of sustainability work, assessments of progress, and emerging challenges. In its press release, the company acknowledged the complexity of these issues and the need for more efficient resource allocation to deliver meaningful impact.
Bea Perez, Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President and Global Chief Communications, Sustainability & Strategic Partnerships Officer, emphasized the importance of collaboration in addressing these challenges.
“We remain committed to building long-term business resilience and earning our social license to operate through our evolved voluntary environmental goals. These challenges are complex and require us to drive more effective and efficient resource allocation and work collaboratively with partners to deliver lasting positive impact.”
Yet, critics argue the adjustments undermine progress in combating pollution and climate change. Moreover, advocacy groups call on the company to uphold stronger environmental standards.
Revised Targets, Renewed Criticism: What’s Next for Coca-Cola?
Coca-Cola’s retreat comes at a time when global negotiations on reducing plastic pollution face significant hurdles. Talks for the world’s first legally binding UN treaty on plastics recently stalled, reflecting broader challenges in tackling the plastics crisis.
Environmental organizations have strongly criticized Coca-Cola’s revised carbon emissions, packaging, and water management goals. Oceana’s Matt Littlejohn labeled the new approach “short-sighted” and warned it could exacerbate the flood of single-use plastics entering waterways and oceans.
Further, Coca-Cola’s softened sustainability stance coincides with growing legal pressures on beverage companies for their plastic waste. In October 2024, Los Angeles County sued Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for misleading claims about the recyclability of their products, arguing that most plastics cannot be disposed of without harmful environmental effects.
The controversy arising from this environmental update underscores the tension between corporate sustainability promises and the practical challenges of implementing them. Coca-Cola’s revised goals reflect a more cautious approach, but the backlash highlights the growing demand for bold action in addressing global environmental and sustainability crises.
- FURTHER READING: McDonald’s Balances Sales Decline with Bold Sustainability Goals
The post The Bottled Truth: Coca-Cola’s New 2035 Environmental Goals Face Sustainability Backlash appeared first on Carbon Credits.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
Net zero is often described as a balancing act: cut what you can, account for the rest, and reach zero on the ledger. That framing is useful, but it leaves something out. It treats every tonne of carbon as interchangeable and every route to zero as equally sound, while the science tells a more specific story.
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