The Coca-Cola Company Middle East Business Unit has announced that it will follow Coca-Cola’s international declaration of support for Earth Hour on March 28, as part of its mission to raise environmental awareness.

Spearheaded by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund), Earth Hour 2009 will see Coca-Cola joining corporations, organisations, governments and individuals in more than 83 countries and 2700 cities across 25 time zones.

Beginning from 8:30 pm local time, the initiative will bring together millions worldwide in the unanimous call for action on climate change.

Coca-Cola Middle East will distribute educational flyers to all employees, partners and suppliers, urging them to follow the company’s lead in the initiative. In keeping with actions around the world, lighted billboards will be dimmed, and bottling plants will be run for that hour on essential lighting only.

The Middle East operations join Coca-Cola staff in 48 other locations around the globe as they support Earth Hour by dimming signs and offices, funding Earth Hour public service announcements, conduct candle-light vigils, and promote the event on delivery trucks.

“Coca-Cola recognizes the urgency of the challenge posed by climate change, and our status as a global company allows us to enact this initiative all over the world, representing a massive cumulative reduction of power usage,” said Alexis Sacre, president of the Coca-Cola Middle East Business Unit.

“We are strongly dedicated to environmental conservation across all of our activities, finding ways to cut back on the use of resources in every aspect of our operations.”

Antoine Tayyar, public affairs and communications manager for the Middle East Business Unit, outlined the company’s environmental strategy.

“Coca-Cola is active year-round in reducing its ecological footprint,” he said.

“All plants adhere to strict environmental controls, and we are greatly concerned with water stewardship, particularly in the Middle East. The environment plays a major role in our corporate social responsibility planning, and we hope to ramp up our activities in this arena even further in 2009.” 

The company is working to conserve fuel in the fleet of approximately 200,000 diesel vehicles and has also begun the use of diesel-electric hybrid trucks across select markets.

Coca-Cola is also working to stabilise carbon dioxide emissions in its manufacturing operations system-wide, and has committed to a 5 percent absolute emissions reduction in developed countries by 2015 (based on a 2004 baseline).

These global commitments will prevent the release of more than 2 million metric tons of CO2 in 2015.

Globally, Coca-Cola has signed an agreement with the WWF to improve water efficiency by 20 per cent over 2004 levels in worldwide operations by 2012.- TradeArabia News Service