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The role of partnerships to advance circular strategies

Sponsored: Diageo is forming partnerships to create sustainable packaging for its premium spirits brands. Read More

Diageo Smirnoff Glass Bottles. Image courtesy of Diageo North America.

Smirnoff Glass Bottles. Image courtesy of Diageo North America.

This article is sponsored by Diageo North America.

As a premium drinks company, we aim to deliver a high-end consumer experience in terms of the liquid, and also the look and feel of its packaging. The premium nature of the products is further reinforced by our belief that innovation — especially that which drives sustainable choices — can offer a new connection, value and differentiation.

Break the take-make-waste cycle

Our ambition is to advance circular objectives all while preserving the beloved consumer experience. As a premium drinks company with over 200 brands, at Diageo we aspire to bring consumers along our journey to encourage waste reduction, support more closed-loop opportunities and promote more reusable approaches. As many consumer brands know, this work happens at the regional and the local level, so we are exploring how we can invest in packaging innovations and scalability for circular models. By designing packaging for circularity, we believe we can offer consumers an ability to choose options that deliver on our sustainability ambition and preserve the essential luxury experience and quality they love. 

Glass Recycling Containers-Outdoor

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Don’t Trash Glass outdoor containers can hold up to approximately 2,000 beer bottles or 1,500 wine and spirits bottles per container.

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Don’t Trash Glass outdoor containers can hold up to approximately 2,000 beer bottles or 1,500 wine and spirits bottles per container. Image courtesy of Don’t Trash Glass program.

Right now, across our global business, we are piloting several initiatives, and we understand that while some of them may stick and scale, others will require customization to market conditions. We see a genuine opportunity to innovate in a way that preserves iconic packaging while generating greenhouse gas emissions reductions. For example, we’re trialing 30,000 bottles of Baileys in an aluminum format across selected airports in Europe, making the product five times lighter than the traditional 700 milliliter. This is one of a number of approaches we are investing in to close in on our overall goal of a 10 percent reduction in packaging weight. In the United States, where glass recycling rates hover in the 30 percent range nationally, we have to unlock approaches that can increase those rates and bring more recycled cullet to the market. Regardless of the approach — innovation, methodical investments or upstream investments in our packaging supply chain — we know we can’t do it alone. Partnerships are what will drive these initiatives, internally and externally. 

Create cross-functional teams for long-term impact initiatives

Closing the loop on recycling looks different in each community. We’re aiming to test and learn to identify the levers we can use to improve regional glass recycling rates. When we made our investment in the Don’t Trash Glass program in partnership with GPI and Glass King Recovery and Recycling, we learned quickly that success depended on significant internal coordination across our marketing, commercial/sales, supply chain and public affairs teams and on designing a project approach that integrated each function’s strength. The marketing team brought the visibility and excitement. The commercial team helped identify strategic accounts and educated us on what messages resonate best with bars, restaurants and distributors as well as how to make them an exciting part of the sales strategy. Additionally, our supply chain team helped us focus on strategic locations such as Illinois and Kentucky to generate high collection rates of high-quality glass that can easily be delivered to our in-market glass suppliers and ultimately get that quality recycled back into domestically produced Diageo spirits packaging. 

Business Chicago

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Full Don’t Trash Glass outdoor containers ready for collection at a Chicago business. Image courtesy of Don’t Trash Glass program.

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Full Don’t Trash Glass outdoor containers ready for collection at a Chicago business. Image courtesy of Don’t Trash Glass program.

Our initial results are positive, and we need to layer in traceability to create a closed loop system with accountability and drive recycled content into our products. Even at this small scale, successful sustainability efforts require cross-functional approaches that leverage a range of skill sets to achieve both commercial and environmental value. The teams continue to collaborate, with a governance charter and project manager collecting the impact numbers that help each internal partner tell their story. 

Be precise when defining your end goal

In our recent backing of the British Aluminium Consortium for Advanced Alloys (BACALL), our end goal was clear. We want to simplify our supply chain, build efficiency and improve the availability of recycled aluminum for one of our well-known brands. The consortium plans to build a plant in the United Kingdom to provide recycled aluminum for more than 400 million cans of Guinness and premixed Gordon’s-and-tonic cans per year: reducing our GHG emissions while also creating jobs. According to BACALL, the U.K. currently makes over 15 billion cans per year but relies on an energy-intensive supply chain to export and import aluminum. The BACALL plant is expected to use 95 percent less energy than the current aluminum supply chain and reduce the GHG involved in bringing aluminum in and out of the country, because the whole process will stay in the U.K.   

Start small, with a focus on scale and strategic markets

In 2024, Diageo became the first spirits producer to sign a global agreement with ecoSPIRITS for the distribution of Gordon’s, Captain Morgan and Smirnoff in reusable glass packaging format in an expected 18 markets over the next three years. We first approached this project on a small scale with a pilot in Southeast Asia in 2022 and found it to be a success from an execution and commercial standpoint. Seeing the positive impact of the smaller trial, we were able to scale our partnerships to more markets. This scaled approach also set us up to build a broader evidence base and expand benefits across our supply chain.

We know we won’t always get it right, which is why we continue to learn and grow, to embrace new opportunities and source new perspectives throughout our journey. We hope these examples will help inspire you on your own journey to a circular future.

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