Eco Plastics, Coca-Cola Enterprises Name Recycling Joint Venture

Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd. (CCE) and ECO Plastics have introduced Continuum Recycling, joint venture the two companies have established to recycle plastic bottles in Great Britain into new Coca-Cola bottles. The two companies announced the joint venture in March 2011.

Jonathan Short, ECO Plastics managing director, says, “Today’s news is important because it demonstrates again our commitment and progress towards realizing what will be a revolutionary project for the British recycling and beverage industries. I’m delighted that we are on track to deliver against the ambitious project timetable.

“ECO Plastics’ plant is already the largest and most sophisticated in Europe, and having put the finishing touches to a £24 million (US$36.85 million) financing packaging in the last month (August 2011), 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,” Short adds.

Nick Brown, CCE commercial recycling manager, says, “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.”

The new facility will increase the amount of bottle-grade recycled PET currently produced in the U.K. to more than 75,000 metric tons per year, more than doubling the current total. Continuum Recycling will process the plastic bottles into food-grade rPET pellet, which will be used in Coca-Cola bottles, enabling CCE to meet its target of including 25 percent recycled PET in all its plastics packaging by 2012.