Coca-Cola Opens Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling Center

The problem of plastic bottles isn’t going away. It doesn’t seem likely that people are going to give up bottled water and soft drinks any time soon, and according to some estimates, a whopping 75% of those bottles end up in landfills. The remainder gets downcycled into park benches and other plastic-based items instead of being turned into new plastic bottles – not exactly a sustainable model.

You might be surprised that one of the sources of all those plastic bottles, The Coca-Cola Co., is leading the effort to change that with a new $60 million bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It’s a joint venture with United Resource Recovery Corp, which bills itself the world’s leader in transforming waste bottles to new ones and has a patented process for recycling food and beverage containers made of PET plastic.

GreenBiz.com spoke to Coca-Cola’s director of sustainable packaging, Scott Vitters, for more details.

The best thing about the plant is that it is intended to make money for Coke and URRC. That means that the project can be duplicated elsewhere.

Here’s how it will work, as explained by Scott: A separate recycling company, led by Coca-Cola Enteprises, the world’s biggest Coke bottler (don’t ask me to explain the interconnected Coke system), will recover PET from a geographic area stretching from the northeast to Florida. The used PET bottles will come from its own manufacturing system, from government recycling centers and from high-profile venues like NASCAR events, college football stadiums and the House of Representatives. As the “official recycler” at the Democratic national convention in Denver, Coca Cola Recycling even collected waste from the arena known as the Pepsi Center. “All that material went back into our bottles—gleefully,” Scott says.

Another source for feedstock is a Coke-backed startup called RecycleBank, which rewards consumers who recycle more and throw away less. VC firm Kleiner Perkins is also an investor in Recycle Bank.

Scott says the driver for the program was environmental – they’re still not sure when the program will pay off due to a combination of factors, not the least of which is the falling value of virgin PET. Emphasizing that it won’t make anyone wildly wealthy, Scott says the company does expect to turn a profit, long term. And as GreenBiz points out, that’s good news because if the Spartanburg plant makes money, more will be built.

It’s a step in the right direction, though it would be far more impressive if the plant were powered with renewable energy. Corporations need to begin taking responsibility for the entire life cycle of the products they create.

Link [GreenBiz.com]
Photo credit: ‘Green Coca Cola Bottles’ by Andy Warhol, via Marc Wathieu

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