Environmental impacts
Concerning environmental impacts marketers can do one of two things; wait for government guidelines, or they can take the initiative to work towards company changes that will make their products less environmentally harmful and more suitable for recycling (Brenkert, G.G). The PepsiCo Corporation has made substantial strides towards making their company environmentally friendly.
According to PepsiCo’s official website, over the last five years, they have reduced the packaging weight of their products by more than 350 million pounds. Packaging weight reductions are equivalent to removing more than 95 tons of packaging material each day during that five year period. In 2012, 91.2 percent of the solid waste generated by more than 260 company-owned manufacturing facilities was put to beneficial use, such as recycling; only 8.8 percent was disposed of through more traditional methods, such as landfills. Less than ten percent of solid waste from PepsiCo facilities around the world end up in landfills (PepsiCo).
The company states that they are facilitating recycling by both their consumers and retail customers. Since 2010, they have added more than 5,000 recycling systems across North America through recycling programs in more than 42 states. These systems have diverted more than 196 million beverage containers to recycling since 2010 (PepsiCo).
In 2006, PepsiCo set a goal to improve global operational water-use by twenty percent per unit of production by 2015; in 2011, they reached that goal. The improvements made by Pepsico has enabled them to save nearly 14 billion liters of water through direct operations in 2012, which, in turn, enabled the company to save more than $15 million in water costs (PepsiCo).
The effort that the Pepsi-Cola Company has put forth into protecting the environment and reducing solid and packaging waste speaks positively to the company’s corporate identity. They are willing to invest the money and time necessary to better the world we live in, not only for themselves, but as well as their consumers.