The Coca-Cola Company has just unveiled its first-ever bottle made of plant-based plastic. This comes exactly at the same time when the company was named one of the world's worst corporate plastic polluters worldwide.
This new bottle prototype is made from plant-based paraxylene (bPX), which was fabricated using sugar from corn. Coca-Cola partnered with plant-based plastic company Virent to convert the bPX into a plant-based terephthalic acid (bPTA).
The technology is ready to be applied commercially, however, the cap and label are still not plastic-free.
These new bottles come more than a decade after Coca-Cola introduced its PlantBottle recyclable PET plastic which is made with up to 30 percent plant-based material. The company rolled out a limited run of the PlantBottle, producing only 900 of them in 2009.
Nancy Quan, Chief Technical and Innovation Officer at the Coca-Cola Company said.
“We have been working with technology partners for many years to develop the right technologies to create a bottle with 100 percent plant-based content—aiming for the lowest possible carbon footprint,”
“And it's exciting that we have reached a point where these technologies exist and can be scaled by participants in the value chain.”
“Our goal is to develop sustainable solutions for the entire industry. We want other companies to join us and move forward, collectively. We don't see renewable or recycled content as areas where we want competitive advantage,” they explained.
Coca-Cola has repeatedly come under fire for its continuous use of plastic. Last year, Coca-Cola revealed that almost 2 billion servings of its drinks are sold worldwide per day.
Break Free From Plastic, which is an anti-plastic movement recently released a report tracking corporate plastic pollution. In this report, Coca-Cola was named as the world's top corporate polluter for the fourth consecutive year.
The report also explained that 69 of the 100 largest economies in the world are not countries, but companies.
