RWM: Coke Prepares for UK Bottle-to-Bottle Involvement

Nick Brown, the commercial recycling manager for Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd. (CCE), told attendees at a recycling convention that the company’s investment in a plastics recycling facility in the United Kingdom represents one of the “three pillars” of CCE’s recycling strategy.

Speaking to attendees at a session at the RWM Exhibition in Birmingham, U.K., in mid-September, Brown referred to the three pillars as:

• Educating and inspiring consumers to recycle more;
• Improving both the quantity and quality of materials collected; and
• Investing in recycling and sorting plants.

Brown indicated that once the new plastics recycling plant came online, CCE in the U.K. would be able to use aluminum packaging that contains 50 percent recycled content, glass packaging that contains 37 percent recycled content and PET plastic packaging that contains 25 percent recycled content.

According to a news release issued shortly after RWM concluded, Continuum Recycling Ltd. will be the name of the CCE-ECO Plastics joint venture.

Used plastic bottles will be recycled in Lincolnshire, England, “and the high quality materials produced will be re-used in new Coca-Cola bottles,” according to the news release.

“ECO Plastics’ plant is already the largest and most sophisticated in Europe, and we will now be able to increase capacity from 100,000 metric tons to 140,000 metric tons of mixed plastic bottles per year, just under 50 percent of the total collected last year,” says Jonathan Short, managing director of ECO Plastics.

“We are delighted to see that work has started on the new facilities where Continuum Recycling will reprocess bottles to produce high quality material for reuse in our packaging,” says CCE’s Brown. “Continuum Recycling is a great name for the business; it explains how effective recycling will lead to a continuous process of use, recycling and reuse for plastic bottles,” he adds.

ECO Plastics began re-processing post-consumer plastic scrap in 2006. The company over the past five years has quadrupled its processing capacity and in early 2009 says it became the first U.K. company to receive food-grade accreditation for its recycled-PET resin.

The RWM in Partnership with CIWM Exhibition was in Birmingham, England, Sept. 13-15 2011.