Coca-Cola offers market for recycled plastics

The company has been involved in a successful trial of using recycled PET in its standard individual bottles, and now believes it could be a long-term outlet for the material in the UK.

” If people can supply us with more recycled PET we will assess it and use it. “
– Martin Rodgers, Coca-Cola
Speaking on the use of recycled plastic at the letsrecycle.com Live! event near Coventry last week, Coca-Cola's PET project manager Martin Rodgers said the difficulty now was to get hold of enough recycled plastic.

He said: “We believe that recycled PET will work, what we want now is more recycled PET. If people can supply us with more recycled PET we will assess it and use it.”

Mr Rodgers told letsrecycle.com that Coca-Cola would be prepared to use as much recycled plastic in its bottles as it could, providing it had not impact on the appearance of its bottles.

Supercycle
Trials of “Supercycle” recovered plastic produced by French firm Amcor have found that customers notice no difference if 25% of the recycled material is used in bottles. The trials – funded by WRAP – involved 75 million plastic bottles, and suggested that as much as 50% recycled content might one day be achieved.

Mr Rodgers said: “Supercycle could be used at 25% in Coca Cola Enterprises 50ml bottles subject to supply and price, right now we just can't get enough – we want more Supercycle.”

Coca-Cola produces about 900 million 500ml drinks bottles each year in the UK, using about 20,000 tonnes of plastic to make them. Trials on using recycled PET have also looked at “URRC” material offered by Cleanaway and “Ecoclear” produced by Wellman.

As well as demonstrating long-term viability in the products, the tests suggest that using recovered plastic can save on 1% of the energy used in manufacturing the bottles.

Collections
With potentially enormous demand for recycled plastic, other experts speaking at the letsrecycle.com Live! seminar spoke of the importance of boosting collections of waste plastic bottles.

Stuart Foster of the plastic bottle recycling organisation Recoup said 86% of local authorities were now collecting plastic bottles for recycling – but only about 13% of the material was being picked up by collections.

Mr Foster, project manager for Recoup, said it was no longer important to just offer collection schemes, that it was now vital to improve existing systems to collect higher amounts of plastic.

He said: “In the past we have encouraged the inclusion of plastic bottles in council's systems, now we need to improve the systems.”

WRAP – the Waste and Resources Action Programme, which is funding Coca-Cola's recycled-PET trials – said councils could no longer claim that running plastic collections was not cost effective.

Mr Davidson explained that 77% of waste disposal authorities and 83% of waste collection authorities surveyed by WRAP believed that adding plastic collection schemes to their existing waste services added little or no cost.