Coca-Cola Unveil New Eco-friendly Packaging Design

On October 22, Coca-Cola said that the company will use bottles with attatched bottle caps starting in 2023. 

Goal: to better collect bottle caps for recycling. 

Along with this new initiative, from April 2022, 50 cl bottles will be launched on the market. These bottles will be made of 100% recycled PET plastic.

"As part of our new sustainable packaging roadmap, we have unveiled a further ambition to accelerate towards 100% recycled or renewable materials in all our plastic bottles," said Franses, the vice president of sustainability of Coca Cola, "This will require strong collaboration and joint innovation with our packaging suppliers. By 2030 this would help us to remove more than 200,000 tonnes of virgin plastic from our packaging supply chain each year.

Be carbon neutral by 2040

Because of the carbon footprint of its products, Coca-Cola is often criticized by the non-governmental organization Break Free From Plastic. According to this NGO, Coca-Cola's greenhouse gas emissions will be ahead of Pepsi and Nestlé for the third consecutive year, the latter being the company with the most plastic pollution in 2020.

For many years, Coca-Cola has been seeking to make up for it through optimized models. In December 2020, the company announced that it had set itself a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. An intermediate deadline of 2030 has also been set: on this day, the group’s goal is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30%.

The acceleration of Coca-Cola's green strategy goes hand-in-hand with the tightening of plastic legislation. France has adopted the goal of "eliminating single-use plastic packaging by 2040". The Ministry of Ecological Transformation also hopes to reduce this type of plastic packaging by 20% by 2025.

Bio-based PET, PEF

In addition to the attached-cap design which is more convenient for the recycling of plastic bottles, Coca-Cola also had a corresponding layout in bio-based PET and PEF.

Avantium, a leading producer of bio-based PEF, opened a PEF pilot plant in Geleen, the Netherlands, in December 2011. The agreement requires Avantium to conduct commercial-scale PEF production for Coca-Cola's next-generation Plant Bottle™ packaging.

According to statistics, in 2012, about 8% of Coca-Cola's PET plastic bottles were based on bio-based material technology. As of June 2013, Coca-Cola has distributed more than 15 billion first-generation bio-based material bottles (30% bio-based material bottles) in 25 countries/regions.