Major Coca-Cola bottler revolutionizes how its beverages are served

The Coca-Cola Company is a notorious plastic polluter. In fact, it's been ranked the worst in the world on numerous occasions. However, the company has also made some strides in shifting its polluting practices in recent years.

Now, its fifth-largest bottling partner, Swire Coca-Cola, is looking to make its own practices more sustainable with an interesting new strategy, per Vending Times.

Swire Coca-Cola manufactures, distributes, and sells Coca-Cola and other beverage brands throughout 13 states in the western U.S.

According to its website, it delivers its products to 31 million customers and pulls in $3 billion in revenue annually. It's easy to imagine that it also creates a titanic amount of pollution.

Fortunately, the big-time bottler openly acknowledges its environmental impact and has set sustainability goals to reduce it significantly. Those goals include using electricity only produced by clean energy sources by 2026 and a 30% reduction in its value chain's carbon footprint by 2030.

The company has recently begun refurbishing used soda fountains, machines, and coolers at its Draper, Utah, facility, according to Vending Times. To do this, they're replacing or repairing parts, recycling unusable materials, and repainting the equipment. The result is an extra seven years added to the life of the vending machine on average.

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This new strategy backs Swire Coca-Cola's claims of a commitment to sustainability, but that's not all that's in it for them; refurbishing old vending machines is far cheaper than buying new ones, which can cost up to $6,000. It seems sustainability and profitability are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.

Now, Swire Coca-Cola is a Coca-Cola bottling partner and not The Coca-Cola Company itself, so credit doesn't belong to the beverage giant.

However, the larger company has made some strides in recent years, like recently committing to disclose its reusable packaging investments, after drawing heavy criticism for backing down on its crucial sustainability pledges.

The Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers have a long way to go before adequately addressing their obscene plastic waste problems. Public outcry against the corporation's pollution seems to be working, though, and some change is underway.