Coke Receives Award For Recycled Content Commitment

The Plastic Redesign Project (PRP) is a coalition of local and state recycling officials. It works with packagers to improve the economics of plastics recycling by designing recyclable plastic bottles and by increasing the use of recycled content in plastic bottles. The award was given during a luncheon Wednesday, March 5, at Raymond Communication's Take It Back! 2003 - Stewardship in the New Economy conference in Alexandria, Va.

Project Director Peter Anderson gave the organization's award for outstanding corporate responsibility to Scott Vitters and Jeffrey Hansen, Coca-Cola's environmental manager and packaging recycling system manager.

"For years," Anderson said, "PET recycling had been struggling financially in significant part because the cost premium for producing food grade bottle resin from recycled instead of virgin plastic made it impossible to gain a beach head in those higher paying bottle markets. Recyclers had been largely relegated to the committed, but low value, fiber markets, with their dependency on the gut-wrenching and extremely volatile markets in China.”

"Then, in 2000, after two miserable years when bale prices for RPET had fallen below 10 cents/pound, Coca-Cola responded positively to calls by stakeholders to establish a public goal for using recycled content in PET bottles," Anderson continued.

Anderson’s speech credited Coke with the following accomplishments:

•  The sheer volume of Coke's commitment to use recycled PET will increase overall demand for recycled PET by close to 10 percent, increasing reclaimers' capacity factors and creating upward pressure on prices for RPET.
• A massive expansion in the size of the bottle market for RPET, which pays about 7 cents/pound more than the fiber markets.
• Creating a standard for other beverage companies to follow that should eventually double Coke's individual impact.
• Helping develop technological innovation that is anticipated to bring down the cost of upgrading technologies for RPET in order to reach the quality needed in bottle-grade and food applications to the point where it is less expensive to use recycled PET than virgin over the commodity cycle.

 Anderson added, "Next we have to all join together to ensure that: first, the increased value of the RPET stream is shared with the local recycling programs so that the supply of RPET keeps flowing; second, new bottle innovations in barriers and tints are done in a way that do not undermine the economics of recycling RPET into new bottles; and, third, further efforts are made to dramatically increase the supply of RPET to meet the rising demand.”

Coca-Cola's Scott Vitters responded on behalf of Coca-Cola saying: "Our system has worked extremely hard over the past decade, during which it has invested more than $15 million, to develop sustainable recycling technologies for food contact applications. We appreciate the recognition for these efforts and look forward to continuing to drive new innovation." Vitters also announced that in 2003 Coke has reached its 10 percent content commitment in 80 percent of its bottles and is ahead of schedule to meeting its 2005 goal.