Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) will cut its use of virgin plastics by 50 tonnes per year thanks to the company’s use of electricity sub-metering in bottle production.

CCA has worked with Australia’s New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage to install electricity sub-meters for each of its resin drying subsystems at the Eastern Creek bottling facility in Sydney.

“All our preform machines have dryers to dry the resin but we identified that drying time varied enormously across machines – from as low as a few hours to over 20 hours,” said Peter West, CCA’s managing director of Australian beverages.

“By using sub-metering we could pinpoint these specific drying times and make sure the team calibrated machines to meet the need,” West explained. “We estimate this cuts our electricity use by 80 MWh of electricity a year, equivalent to 67 tonnes of carbon emissions.” It also reduces resin loss from overdrying.

The move forms part of CCA’s plan to reduce its virgin plastics use. The company intends to make 7 out of 10 plastics bottles in Australia entirely from recycled materials by the end of this year.