Coke's new bottle plant

Coke is really trying to be environmentally responsible for and over the past few years have been coming up with some interesting initiatives o reduce to reduce their impact o the planet. They've already committed $60 million to building the world's largest bottle recycling plant and have stated a goal of returning to communities and nature an amount of water equivalent to what they use in beverages and their production. Now they've just announced a new plastic bottle that's made partly of plants!

This from yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

"Traditional plastic bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate, commonly known as PET, which is derived from petroleum, a nonrenewable resource. In 2006, production of plastic bottles for U.S. beverage consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based environmental think tank.

"The new plant-based bottle developed by Coke is composed of 70% petroleum-based and 30% sugar-cane-based materials. The cane is crushed and mashed to produce juice, which is then fermented and distilled, producing ethanol. That ethanol is then converted through a series of chemical processes such as oxidation to a mono-ethylene glycol—a component normally derived from petroleum for use in plastic bottles. The MEG is then mixed with terephthalic acid to create PET plastic.

"Coke began selling its flagship Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light and Coke Zero in the new bottles in Denmark in time for the United Nations Climate Change summit. With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games just a few weeks away, the company has introduced plantbottles containing its Dasani water in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. Coke says it aims to sell two billion drinks in plantbottles globally by the end of 2010.

"Coke also commissioned and funded an Imperial College London analysis that compared the "life cycle" of the new bottle to a regular plastic bottle to see if the impact on the environment was different, says Scott Vitters, the company's director of sustainable packaging. He says the study found that production of the plantbottle leaves a 12%-to-19% smaller carbon footprint than production of a regular plastic bottle. The company is awaiting third-party verification of the findings from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Germany, he adds.

"Environmental groups say the Coke bottle now being introduced is a slight improvement over regular PET bottles, but they say it won't solve a bigger problem with plastic bottles: the fact that most consumers don't recycle them.

"A mere 27% of PET containers were recycled in the U.S. in 2008, according to the National Association for PET Container Resources. The new bottle is "definitely positive, but no, this doesn't make me jump up and down with joy," says Susan Collins, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, who wishes the beverage makers would also use recycled content."

The full article can be found at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870367210457465421277451047...