CES stops billions of bottles and cans polluting the planet with Oracle Cloud

Container Exchange Services (CES) is a joint venture between Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and Lion, a major Australian brewery. CES provides IT services to state-based recycling schemes in Australia, including the Container Exchange and WARRRL, nonprofit organizations in Queensland and Western Australia for recycling beverage containers such as plastic bottles or aluminum cans. 

Despite having established sustainability goals, Australia has struggled to meet the target it set for plastic recycling. According to the Australian Packaging Covenant Organization, just 16% of recovered plastic was being recycled, well below the 70% target. 

CES looked to develop a services-based IT platform from scratch to support the recycling scheme’s IT need for an industry-wide solution. The IT platform provides 26 applications to support the 800 to 1,000 companies that make up the end-to-end supply chain of the recycling scheme.

The platform needed to be scalable and easy to maintain. CES saw the cloud as the best fit, but still needed to find the cloud provider with the right combination of services to deliver on its goals.

After evaluating several major cloud service providers, CES selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as well as Oracle Cloud Applications. The decision was based on Oracle’s integrated solutions from Oracle Cloud ERP, which CES saw as the market-leading SaaS ERP system on the market, and OCI with Oracle Autonomous Database, which eliminates complex database administration. The end-to-end services from Oracle meant that CES could focus more on constantly innovating and delivering more value to its customers.

By deploying the services platform on OCI rather than on-premises, CES is helping its customers save between AUD 2 million to AUD 3 million a year. It was a highly effective IT platform that launched 320 retail sites on the first day of the recycling launch, with 99.99% availability and tens of millions of customer payments since then.

With Oracle Cloud ERP and a combination of Oracle Autonomous Database Warehouse and Oracle Analytics Cloud, CES will be able to automate finance processes and enhance business insights to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve controls as it expands.

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) database provides the underlying data storage to store and process information while using Oracle Integration Cloud and Oracle GoldenGate for integrations to other CES applications, such as connecting the recycling point-of-sale terminals and database, as well as banking transactions.

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing also drives the core payment engine and user portal. Oracle Autonomous Database Warehouse consolidated the data from various systems for a single source of truth. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides easy to use and highly visual financial analytics.

Of the OCI services, CES uses Oracle Content Management to support creating and publishing content for a strong web presence to raise awareness. Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and OCI cloud native development help CES build and scale easily. Running the services platform on the cloud has also been a big benefit for CES’ developers needing to work remotely. Development has not been affected by the pandemic or border closures, with CES implementing an entire recycling scheme for a customer in Western Australia remotely. Looking ahead, CES plans to use the service platform’s flexibility to develop new applications.

With the support of CES and its services platform on OCI, Australia is improving its recycling record and promoting the circular economy. The services platform has supported the recycling of more than four billion containers across the country and helped refund AUD 400 million. In Queensland, Container Exchange has stopped around 120,000 tons each year of recyclable bottles and cans going into landfill sites or the ocean.

CES has already grown by 226% in the last two years. By 2023, it aims to support recycling schemes across the whole of Australia, and from 2024 onward, it plans to expand overseas, initially in New Zealand.