After months of pressure to reduce waste, the beverage industry is stepping up efforts to promote recycling and use more recycled plastic in production of its soda, water, juice and tea bottles.
Some companies are reformulating containers to reduce the amount of plastic.
Who's doing what
Coca-Cola says it's planning a plant that can recycle as many as 2 billion 20-ounce bottles a year. The company has a 36 percent share of the business in U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages, a $106-billion-a-year industry, and it has built recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. Coke wants to boost the recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10 percent, from less than 5 percent in 2006.
Coke and its biggest bottler, Coca-Cola Enterprises, have formed a company that plans to open centers in the U.S. to collect recyclable beverage material.
The American Beverage Association trade group has formed a task force from Coke, PepsiCo and Nestle's U.S. water unit to look for ways to spark consumer interest in recycling. One possibility: throwing the industry's weight behind efforts to clone the best programs.
Coke, Pepsi and other beverage companies typically fought laws mandating deposits on bottles and cans. But some beverage makers are starting to warm up to financial incentives for recycling. Coke has invested more than $2 million in RecycleBank Llc., a company that gives consumers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware coupons for their throwaways. The program will expand to parts of New England. The company is also in talks with PepsiCo.
Why now?
The tidal wave of bottled water -- just 17 percent of the U.S. market share, compared with 66 percent for soft drinks, but growing rapidly while soft-drink sales have declined -- has increased the beverage industry's ravenous appetite for plastic. Demand for recycled polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, is fierce because it can cost 50 percent less than new plastic.
PET bottles are cheap, lightweight and more convenient than refillable glass bottles, which require gallons of water to be cleaned and are heavier to transport.
In the U.S., just 23 percent of recyclable PET bottles and jars were recycled in 2005, down from 40 percent a decade earlier, according to the National Association for PET Container Resources.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in December that a federal bottle-deposit bill could help boost municipal recycling rates.
Fending off a federal bill could require the industry to show continued signs that it is willing to change.
Coke and Pepsi have reduced the plastic in their soft-drink bottles, which are heavier than water bottles to preserve carbonation. Coke says it will eliminate 100 million pounds of plastic from its U.S. products this year.
Pepsi, which gets about 10 percent of the PET it uses in the U.S. from recycled materials, says it has trimmed the amount of plastic in its half-liter Aquafina water bottles by nearly 40 percent since 2002. The company is working on an even lighter version. Nestle, with regional brands Poland Spring and Arrowhead, recently introduced lighter bottles.
