Coca-Cola Great Britain is installing fifty new recycling bins in Southampton City Centre under its Recycle Zone initiative.

Working in partnership with Southampton City Council, 15 double stainless steel recycling bins will create the UK’s first city-centre Recycle Zone to encourage residents to recycle-on-the-go.

A further 35 black dual bins for recycling and general waste will be situated around in parks and other central locations in the city. Southampton City Council’s waste management team have also been supplied with a branded collection vehicle to help with the specific collection and maintenance of the bins.

Southampton City Council cabinet member for environment and transport Cllr Matthew Dean said: “We know that in Southampton we need to do all we can to get people to recycle and particularly, to make it easy for people to recycle. And by working with Coca-Cola we can go a long way to achieving this.”

Coca-Cola has been working with the Waste & Resources Action Programme over the past year, launching 21 Recycle Zones in shopping centres, theme parks, transport hubs and universities. So far, the live Recycle Zones have collected 20 tonnes of material for recycling, with a further 59 zones planned by the end of 2011.

President of Coca-Cola Great Britain Sanjay Guha said: “We’re committed to reducing our impact on the environment: as well as putting our own house in order we must help our customers to do more and our Recycle Zones are a great way of doing that. We believe that increasing recycling levels is one of the most effective steps we can take to bring us closer to our goal of operating sustainably.”

Coca-Cola’s new national ‘Keep it Going. Recycle’ aims to show people how recycling drinks bottles and cans can make a major difference to the environment by cutting the carbon footprint of a packaged drink by over a half.