New Plant to Increase Coke Recycling of Plastic Bottles

WASHINGTON — The Coca-Cola Co. announced Wednesday it will help finance construction of the world's largest recycling plant capable of producing food-grade plastic from old beverage bottles.

The plant, to be built in Spartanburg, S.C., will produce about 100 million pounds of recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a year, officials said.

The plant, which will employ 150 persons, will be built jointly by Coke and United Resource Recovery Corp., a PET recycling firm. It will open next year and be fully operational in 2009, said Sandy Douglas, president of Coca-Cola North America.

He described the plant as the centerpiece of a $60 million Coke program aimed at eventually causing 100 percent of the PET it uses in the United States to be reused in beverage bottles or recycled for other uses.

He said the company also will establish centralized recycling centers throughout the United States to recover plastic and other packaging materials used in its beverage businesses.

And the company is increasing its investment in a firm that promotes household recycling efforts, he said.

"We're putting our resources behind creating packages that have a value ultimately and are recyclable," Douglas said. "We are investing in infrastructure to ensure that our packages are recycled and ultimately reused."

He said, "We want to reduce our environmental footprint across our entire operation, and packaging is obviously a key area."

Coca-Cola officials said not all of the recycled PET would be used in beverage bottles, but that through its efforts the company hoped to "drive" recycling practices that result in 100 percent reuse.

Currently, all of the PET that can be recovered through bottle reclamation efforts is gobbled up by an avid recycling industry that uses the material for a variety of products, including apparel and carpeting.

The goal of reclaiming 100 percent of Coca-Cola's PET was hailed by Kate Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, who called it "a challenge" to other beverage companies.

"That kind of commitment is head and shoulders above other companies throughout the world," she said.

The coalition is a nonprofit advocacy group. A Coca-Cola official sits on its board of directors.

Coke officials said the company has not set a specific time for seeing all of its PET recycled, describing this as "an aspirational goal."

However, they said they expect that 30 percent of the material will find its way into some recycled use by 2010, and that "well north of 10 percent" of recycled PET will go into Coke's U.S. beverage bottles by then.

Coca-Cola used 10 percent recycled PET in its bottles in 2004. The figure dropped to about 5 percent last year because, officials said, the company was "refocusing" its efforts on other recycling initiatives.

Douglas said that in its first 10 years of operation, the Spartanburg plant will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by the equivalent of 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

It was not immediately clear how this will happen, since all of the PET to be recycled through the plant would be recycled by other industries if it were available to them. The United States also exports millions of pounds of used PET to China for recycling.

In addition to the Spartanburg plant and the increased emphasis on the collection of used bottles, Coca-Cola has introduced a line of merchandise produced from recycled PET.

Products are marketed with "playful, pithy slogans" such as "my white T-shirt is green" and "I am wearing post-consumer waste," the company said in a press release.