Coca Cola Innovates Way to Recycle Ocean Plastic

Coca Cola has teamed up with Ioniqa Technologies, Indorama Ventures and Mares Circulares (Circular Seas) to do something that no company has been able to successfully do before. They have created a way to recycle plastic that has been dumped into the ocean. This will help us to clean out garbage from the sea as well as recycle it into a reusable package.

They have made 300 prototypes of the ocean plastic bottles with plastic that was retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea and beaches. The plastic was thought to be unusable due to poor quality but now is able to be upcycled into higher quality plastic. The bottles they have created for prototypes contain 25% marine plastics.

“Too many of the world’s finite resources are currently discarded as waste. We know we need to do more to correct this. The targets we have set out today are ambitious and rightly so. There is a valuable role for packaging, but it must always be collected, recycled and reused.

“Our aim, working in partnership, is to see the term “single-use plastic” become redundant, both in our business and beyond, as all of our plastic – and indeed all of our packaging – is delivered within a closed loop.”

Coca Cola Western Europe’s president Tim Brett

Coca Cola claims that it is the first “Successful attempt to incorporate ocean plastics in food and drink packaging”. The process is called depolymerization and it breaks down the plastic allowing it to be reformed. They strip it of its impurities then rebuild it into food grade quality plastic.

This is a huge step in the right direction and Coca Cola is creating a good initiative to help clean our seas. Over time this may be the primary way that they create the packaging for their products. They plan on rolling out more of these bottles in 2020 to create them as the new normal.