Picture taken on July 6, 2009 in Castanet-Tolosan shows Coca-Cola bottles on an assembly line at a … [+]
Coca-Cola Sweden will make all its plastic bottles from recycled material from next year on, the company announced last week. In this way, it will become the first market in the world to make all its plastic bottles from 100% recycled plastic.
Coca-Cola claims that the switch will eliminate 3,500tonnes of virgin plastic each year and that it will mean 25% fewer CO2 emissions.
Around 40 different variants of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles – including Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and Bonaqua – will transition to recycled plastic (rPET). Bottle closures and labels, however, will continue to be made from polythene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) respectively, to be removed in the recycling process.
“Our ambition is to see the words ‘single-use plastic’ and indeed ‘single-use packaging’ become obsolete, with all packaging collected and reused,” the general manager for Coca-Cola AB in Sweden, Barbara Tönz, told Forbes. “We are committed to advancing the development of a circular economy, with 100% of our packaging collected, recycled or reused so that it does not end up as rubbish or end up in the environment.”
The move is going to begin in the first quarter of 2020 in the company’s bottling plant in Jordbro, 20km from Stockholm, a factory producing 90% of the drinks sold by Coca-Cola in Sweden.
Coca-Cola decided to start the transition in Sweden because the country is considered to be at the forefront when it comes to sustainability – due also to the efficiency of its deposit and return system, Returpak.
“In parallel, we announced that we would be supporting well-designed deposit return schemes across Europe, where an effective alternative doesn’t already exist,” Tönz said.
A recent audit, conducted by Break Free From Plastic via volunteers who collected over 475,000 pieces of plastic waste around the world, found out that the No. 1 brand for plastic pollution was from Coca-Cola with 11,732 items.
Greenpeace USA plastics campaigner Kate Melges argued that, while moving away from virgin plastic is a good thing, it is time for Coca-Cola to stop using throwaway plastic altogether.
“It is simply not realistic for Coca-Cola to think that better collection efforts will solve the plastic pollution crisis when the company produces over 100billion plastic bottles each year,” Melges told Forbes. “In a world where Coca-Cola is yet again the worst polluter following global brand audits and less than 10% of all plastic ever made is recycled, it is going to take the company fundamentally rethinking its polluting business model and shifting toward reuse to make a real difference.”
The company is currently working towards its global ambition for a World Without Waste, meaning 50% of recycled content in plastic bottles and a bottle or a can recovered for each sold one by 2030.
In Western Europe, as part of the sustainability action plan This is Forward, the goal is to reach 50% of recycled content in plastic bottles by 2023 and 100% by 2025. They also committed to publish the packaging footprint transparently and on an annual basis.
