Coke vending machines going green

Cold drinks, warming planet

To enjoy an ice-cold Coke, do we need to heat up the planet?

The climate-change problem has been the toughest for Coca-Cola to crack. Isdell sees progress in the way the discussion around refrigeration and vending machines has changed. It used to be "around why would we want to do this," he says. "Now we're in the solutions business. That's a totally different paradigm."

It's hard to overstate the complexity of the problem facing Coke. Its system buys only about 1% of the world's compressors, so it needs to enlist backing from other buyers like McDonald's and Unilever. The refrigeration industry supply chain includes compressor manufacturers like Danfoss and Sanyo, component manufacturers like Norsk Hydro and Modine and system integrators like Frigoglass and Fuji, all of whom have investments in existing HFC technology. Commercial coolers are bigger, and they are opened more often than home refrigerators, so they need powerful coolants. HFC does an excellent job of trapping heat, but that's why it's such a problem when it is released into the atmosphere.

On energy-efficiency, Coke has made gains. Today, many of their two-door and bigger coolers are shipped with a proprietary energy-management system that adds about $25 to $30 to the cost of the cooler. Even though the energy savings go to the retailers, its bottlers are willing to foot that bill. "The economics are quite good," Isdell says. These "smart" vending machines learn to shut down when demand slackens-say, at night or on weekends for a vending machine in an office where people work during the day.

And the company has been able to remove HFC from the foam insulation of virtually all of the new coolers that enter the system. That's another step in the right direction, since it reduces demand for HFC; the less HFC that's made, the fewer the emissions during the manufacturing and disposal process.

But HFC is still being used as a coolant in nearly all coolers and vending machines because the alternative developed by Coke and others-a coolant that uses carbon dioxide-is more expensive. It requires retooling the industry, with no direct payback. "We've proven the efficiency, the reliability, the technical merits," says Bryan Jacob, a former Olympic weightlifter who has taken charge of Coke's efforts to curb its emissions, a program called eKOfreshment. "The key obstacle is cost." No one in the value chain is willing to foot the bill to fight climate change.

If nothing else, this demonstrates that companies - by themselves - can't solve the climate problem. Kert Davies of Greenpeace, which has worked with Coke for years, says government may have to intervene - perhaps by providing companies like Coke with economic rewards to stop using potent greenhouse gases. Climate legislation now pending in Congress would gradually phase out HFCs.

Isdell is not discouraged. "There's always a lag when you are rolling out a new technology," he says. Climate change, he says, is a challenging issue for Coke; unlike water or packaging, its relevance to the business is not as obvious. "We'll get there," he says. "We're only at the beginning."