Coke's PlantBottle first step toward 100%-renewable, 100%-recyclable bottle, reveals Scott Vitters
- Filed in:
- Bottles,
- Renewable resources,
- Beverage
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Following The Coca-Cola’s Company’s Nov. 16 commercial launch of its PlantBottle™ PET bottle, made from 30% renewable resources, the industry is abuzz with questions on the new technology. In this 15-minute Podcast, Scott Vitters, The Coca-Cola Company's director of sustainable packaging, speaks with GreenerPackage.com managing editor Anne Marie Mohan, delving into details about the revolutionary package, which allows for the inclusion of plant-based resources, while still being recyclable.
In this exclusive interview, Vitters explains how the PlantBottle fits into The Coca-Cola Company’s larger strategy around sustainable packaging, and talks about the company’s aggressive goals for developing a 100% plant-based, 100%-recyclable beverage bottle.
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Amazing! We hope this can be a new way of bottles used in beverage.
If it is not degradable, and the raw material is being sourced from Brazil and ending up mainly in Canada right now, how is this actually a good thing for the environment? It seems like a great concept, but what is the real advantage to the environment and what is the highest percentage that can be used without compromising the recyclability of the product? Does this technology limit the percentage of the bottle being plant based to 30% ?
There is a big difference between the origin of the material (oil or biomass) and the end-of-life of the material (landfill, recycle, incineration). The benefit of using biobased (origin) material over oil based material is to stop bringing new carbon into the atmosphere. Coke is looking to reduce its carbon footprint by using material with a renewable origin and subsequently to recycle that material to further reduce its carbon and environmental footprint. PET consists of two parts: 20-30% is ethylene-glycol, which for Plant Bottle is derived from biomass, the remaining 70-80% is terephthalic acid which is still oil based. So while it is step into the good direction, we are certainly not there yet! There is a new technology to replace the terephthalic acid part of the polymer (70-80%) by a biobased product called FDCA. This yields a completely green polymer. For more information see www.yxy.com.
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