COKE RECEIVES AWARD FOR RECYCLED CONTENT COMMITMENT
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:
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Increasing overall demand for recycled PET by close to 10 percent, growing reclaimers’ capacity factors and creating upward pressure on prices for recycled PET (RPET).•
Expanding the bottle market for RPET, which pays about 7 cents per pound more than the fiber markets.•
Creating a standard for other beverage companies to follow.•
Helping develop technological innovation that is anticipated to lower the cost of upgrading technologies for RPET in order to reach the quality needed in bottle-grade and food applications, making it less expensive to use recycled PET than virgin resin.Vitters responded: "Our system has worked extremely hard over the past decade, during which it has invested more than $15 million, to develop sustainable recycling technologies for food contact applications. We appreciate the recognition for these efforts and look forward to continuing to drive new innovation." Vitters added that Coke has reached its 10 percent content commitment in 80 percent of its bottles in 2003 and is ahead of schedule to meeting its 2005 goal to use 10 percent recycled content in all its bottles.
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