Packaging

Packaging is an important part of our business. We’re prioritising action in packaging that delivers benefits in terms of carbon savings and increased efficiency while promoting our iconic brands.

Overview

An important part of addressing our scope 3 emissions is through our packaging. We want to transition to a world where high-quality, affordable, and sustainable packaging becomes the standard for drinks products.

We continue to respond proactively to consumer demand and legislation for sustainable products. We are committed to reducing our value chain carbon footprint by reducing packaging weight, increasing our recycled content, reducing single-use packaging, and deploying and scaling circular business models.

Download our packaging strategy

Making packaging more sustainable

Many consumers want to transition to sustainable products but, in practice, experience barriers to being able to do so. To address these barriers, we’re focused on experiences, desirability and delivering sustainability objectives.

Aligning with our customers is critical to making progress alongside consumers. In anticipation of future trends, we’re piloting several test-and-learn initiatives, including circular business models. We're leveraging Diageo-enabled initiatives as well as partnerships and supplier programmes. For example, we’ve partnered with ecoSPIRITS to pilot refillable spirits packaging (ecoTOTES) in the on-trade across 18 markets over the next three years. Each refillable container is designed to be used up to 150 times and aims to eliminate up to 1,000 single-use bottles over their lifespan.

We’re prioritising a reduction in material use and believe things that can be reused, must be reused, and things that cannot be reused must be recycled. We’re accelerating the development of new packaging formats through our innovation teams whilst building our marketing propositions to engage our consumers.

We’re exploring alternative forms of packaging through our innovation platform, Diageo Sustainable Solutions.

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Reducing waste

As with most products, making alcoholic drinks has the potential to generate waste at many stages of the product lifecycle.

In 2020, we achieved zero waste to landfill at all our supply and office sites. But we want to go further. We are committed to reducing the volume of materials used, and reusing or recycling waste from our operations in ways that benefit the environment and local communities.

Our Spirit of Progress targets

Continue our work to reduce total packaging and increase recycled content in our packaging (delivering a 10% reduction in packaging weight and increasing the percentage of recycled content in our packaging to 60%).

We’ll continue to work on our other targets within Spirit Progress, including data on rPET (recycled polyethylene terephthalate) in our plastic packaging. The recyclability of our packaging and waste reduction efforts are available in our ESG Reporting Index.