Fizzing with Good Intentions

Sam Baker speaks to engineers at Carlsberg Britvic working to make their drinks more sustainable – both environmentally and commercially

EACH YEAR, beverages behemoth Britvic produces around 2.5bn litres of soft drink, 1.8bn of which is made and sold in the UK alone. Responsible for all J2O, Fruit Shoot, Robinson’s and Tango products, as well as having exclusive bottling rights for PepsiCo products sold in the UK, it amounts to global revenue of £1.9bn (US$2.5bn). Placing Britvic plc in the country’s top 20 food and drink manufacturers for 2024, it led brewing giant Carlsberg to value Britvic at £3.3bn before completing a full acquisition of the company early in 2025.

However, big money translates to a big environmental footprint. In 2024, according to the company’s latest sustainability report, total Scope 1 and 2 emissions were 45,066 t of CO2e, while downstream Scope 3 emissions were 96,984 t of CO2e. Britvic also reported using 4,455,000 m3 of water in 2024, equating to 1.94 m3 per tonne of production.

Britvic has set several sustainability goals for 2025: to reduce manufacturing water use per tonne of product by 20% compared to 2017 levels, cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50%, and reduce Scope 3 emissions by 35%. They aim to achieve net zero emissions across all scopes by 2050.

In January, the newly named Carlsberg Britvic announced a £1.25m upgrade to the centralised chilling system at their main factory in Rugby, supported by a government grant of £305,000, part of the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund. The company has calculated the new system will cut emissions by 650 t of CO2e per year.

Another improvement is a system to capture waste heat at their factory in Beckton, east London, which can then be recycled for further manufacturing processes that require steam. Britvic says this could reduce steam demand by 70–75%, cutting emissions from heating at Beckton by 50%, amounting to around 1,200 t of CO2e annually.

But are all Britvic’s efforts enough to create a truly sustainable soft drinks production line?

Cool head

Yesi Rahaman is a chemical engineer on Britvic’s graduate scheme based at the Beckton factory. Graduating from the University of Birmingham in 2023, she always wanted a job that allowed her to do “actual engineering” every day.

Since finishing university, Rahaman has remained enthusiastic about theoretical chemical engineering, but her true passion is to see the real-life application of the theory and, since starting at Britvic in October 2024, she has found the food and drink industry to be the perfect showcase. Each day, she applies concepts like heat and mass transfer, but the thrill for Rahaman comes in being able to “visualise and understand how a lot of the pieces fit together” by seeing the final product roll off the production line.

Rahaman is involved with two projects looking at introducing new technology to carbonate the drinks – the part of the process that makes the drinks fizzy. Currently, industry-standard carbonators inject CO2 into liquid maintained at a temperature between 7°C and 10°C, as CO2 has low solubility at higher temperatures. Rahaman’s team are looking at introducing a SubCarb system, which generates a “cold boiling” effect: temporarily vaporising the beverage fluid below its atmospheric boiling point by rapidly decreasing the pressure.

“This facilitates gas phase contact mixing, substantially increasing the surface area available for dissolution and vastly improving the reaction kinetics, which eliminates the need for the water stream to be chilled prior to mixing,” says Rahaman. This saves a huge amount of energy by “removing most of the cooling load from the carbonation process”.

“This solution would be the first installation in the UK,” Rahaman adds.

The CO2 used in carbonation is shipped as a liquid but must be injected into the drinks as a gas, consuming significant amounts of energy. Typically, CO2 is heated using steam, produced from boiling water by burning natural gas. However, Rahaman says her team are now “looking to move towards carbon neutral steam production which eliminates gas from all operations on site”.