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Coca Cola is changing its ways for the good of the environment. It has been working with Madison-based company Virent Inc. and they have developed the world’s first ever PET plastic bottles made entirely out of plant material, that Coca Cola Inc. intends to use for its products as soon as possible.
This is actually not the first time that Coca Cola has tried to go green. In fact, they have used over 35 billion bottles that were made out of plant-based materials in a proportion of 30% since 2009. This has actually had a tangible effect on the environment, as they have basically succeeded in reducing their carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping 315,000 tons.
The difference is that this new bottle would be constituted entirely out of plant material, as opposed to only 30%. The technology is called PlantBottle and it has been officially launched this Wednesday in Milan, Italy at the World Expo.
What the PlantBottle developers do is use plant materials, namely sugarcane and more importantly, the discarded material from sugarcane-based sugar companies to develop paraxylene, which is then used to make the bottles from.
By using sugarcane instead of petroleum, it can drastically reduce its carbon footprint. The PlantBottle cannot however make its negative impact on the environment nonexistent, but it would be a enormous improvement to the current state of the industry in this type of bottle was introduced.
The paraxylene bottles look, feel and can be recycled like the normal polyethylene bottles, but with a much smaller trace of it remaining on the environment.
Coca Cola Inc. intends to have all of its bottles worldwide manufactured in accordance to the PlantBottle technology by 2020. Nancy Quan, Coca-Cola’s executive in charge or research and development said that this change constitutes a milestone in the beverage company’s packaging technologies.
The collaboration between Coca Cola Inc. and Virent Inc. has been mutually beneficial, as the PlantBottle company has received the funding it so desperately needed in order to expand their production lines and evolve from the demonstration line stage they were at before this collaboration.
Hopefully, Coca Cola will manage to meet the expectation of changing all of its bottles all around the world with less polluting plant-based ones by 2020. Coca Cola Inc. is the first company to ever have such environment friendly bottles and if they set a good example, then maybe other major PET-using companies will follow in their footsteps.
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