Paris Olympics provided ‘unique opportunity’ for DRS trial, says Cola-Cola

The company trialled a system of collecting bottles during the Olympic Games and recycling them to be reused during the Paralympics.

A Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) facility 15km outside Paris is said to have played a key role in helping to cut the usual recycling cycle from four months to less than four weeks for some bottles used during the games.

Closing the loop

Coca-Cola, involved with the Olympics since Amsterdam 1928, also set up 700 drink fountains with refill options, returnable glass and plastic bottles made from recycled material, excluding caps and labels, and served drinks in reusable cups provided by Paris 2024.

It said the scale and complexity of the Olympic and Paralympic Games provided a “unique opportunity” to test solutions to packaging waste, and it is considering what it learnt from Paris.

Wouter Vermeulen, Coca-Cola’s vice president for sustainability and public policy in Europe, said: “Packaging accounts for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. We support DRS in Europe because we need to drive collection. We don’t want to see our bottles turned into a shampoo bottle or a car carpet. That’s why we want closed-loop recycling.”