Nonmetallics

The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, has received an award from the Plastic Redesign Project for its commitment to use recycled content in its plastic bottles and help in commercializing PET recycling.

The Plastic Redesign Project (PRP), Madison, Wis., is a coalition of local and state recycling officials. It works with packagers to improve the economics of plastics recycling by designing recyclable plastic bottles and increasing the use of recycled content in plastic bottles. The award was given during Raymond Communication’s Take It Back! 2003 - Stewardship in the New Economy conference in Alexandria, Va., in early March.

Project Director Peter Anderson presented the PRP award for outstanding corporate responsibility to Scott Vitters and Jeffrey Hansen, Coca-Cola’s environmental manager and packaging recycling system manager.

"For years," Anderson said, "PET recycling had been struggling financially in significant part because the cost premium for producing food-grade bottle resin from recycled instead of virgin plastic made it impossible to gain a beach head in those higher paying bottle markets. Recyclers had been largely relegated to the committed, but low value, fiber markets, with their dependency on the extremely volatile markets in China."

Anderson credited Coke with: