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Coca Cola

PET plastic is one of the core materials in Coca Cola’s business; how else could they get their sodas, fruit juices and waters to market? PET is recyclable, and Coca Cola is increasing its commitment to recycling, and to using recycled PET to close the loop.

PET to PET

It’s estimated that 1.5 million tons of PET or Polyethylene terephthalate, is collected for recycling every year. But 75 percent of PET bottles end up as trash. Those bottles are a resource for Coca Cola who can break them down and create PET pellets to make new bottles, creating a perpetual resource loop.

“The driver for this program was environmental. It’s not going to make anyone wildly wealthy. But we’re looking to turn a profit, long term.”

Scott Vitters
Director, Sustainable Packaging
Coca Cola

In February 2009 Coca Cola formally launched the largest bottle-to-bottle PET recycling plant. A joint venture with Spartanburg, South Carolina-based recycler United Resource Recovery Corp, the plant will be able to produce one hundred million pounds of recycled PET plastic chip per year when fully operational. That’s enough PET to make two billion twenty ounce bottles. Getting the feedstock is the key: used PET bottles will come from its own manufacturing system, from government recycling centers and from recycling at high-profile venues and events.

The PET processing plant is a small but important step towards the company’s stated aim of recycling or reusing all of its plastic bottles and cans. Coca Cola intends to increase its use of recycled PET bottles to ten percent by the end of 2010, and fifteen percent by 2015. At least fifty percent of the plant’s PET output will be used by Coca Cola, while the rest will be sold to other PET users.

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