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Remember the Cola War? Get ready for the Bottle Wars.
PepsiCo Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a bottle made entirely of plant material, which it says bests the technology of competitor Coca-Cola and reduces its potential carbon footprint.
The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. In the future, the company expects to broaden the renewable sources used to create the “green” bottle to include orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its foods business. This process further reinforces PepsiCo’s “Power of One” advantage by driving a strategic beverage innovation via a food-based solution.
The new bottle looks, feels and protects the drink inside exactly the same as its current bottles, said Rocco Papalia, senior vice president of advanced research at PepsiCo. “It’s indistinguishable.”
World's First 100 Percent Plant-Based, Renewably Sourced PET Bottle
PepsiCo says it is the world’s first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant-based materials. Coca-Cola Co. currently produces a bottle using 30 percent plant-based materials and recently estimated it would be several years before it has a 100 percent plant bottle that’s commercially viable.
“We’ve cracked the code,” said Papalia.
The discovery potentially changes the industry standard for plastic packaging. Traditional plastic, called PET, is used in beverage bottles, food pouches, coatings and other common products.
The plastic is the go-to because it’s lightweight and shatter-resistant, its safety is well-researched and it doesn’t affect flavors. It is not biodegradable or compostable. But it is fully recyclable, a characteristic both companies maintain in their new creations.
Traditional PET plastic is made using fossil fuels, like petroleum, a limited resource that’s rising in price. By using plant material instead, companies reduce their environmental impact. Pepsi says the new plastic will cost about the same as traditional plastic.
The company, based in Purchase, N.Y., said it has had dozens of people working on the process for years. While PepsiCo wouldn’t specify the cost to research and design the new bottle, Papalia said it is in the millions of dollars.
PepsiCo says of its 19 biggest brands, those that generate more than $1 billion in revenue, 11 are beverage brands that use PET. The company says the packaging will cost roughly the same as it does today.
PepsiCo plans to test the product in 2012 in a few hundred thousand bottles. Once the company is sure it can successfully produce the bottle at that scale, it will begin converting all its products over.
With this development, PepsiCo continues its leadership position in environmental sustainability and driving progress against the global goals and commitments it announced in 2010 to protect the Earth’s natural resources through innovation and more efficient use of land, energy, water and packaging. Specific examples of PepsiCo’s recent environmental innovations and progress include:
- SunChips developing the world’s first fully compostable bag and using solar power at the Modesto manufacturing facility to take some of the plant off the electrical grid;
- light-weighting Aquafina’s bottles with the introduction of the Eco-Fina bottle in 2009, the lightest bottle of its size among U.S. bottled water brands;
- Naked Juice transitioning to a 100 percent post-consumer recycled plastic bottle with the introduction of its reNEWabottle™ – the first beverage, distributed nationally in the U.S., to do so;
- achieving “positive water balance” in India in 2009 – through direct seeding initiatives, the company replenished nearly six billion liters of water across India, exceeding the total intake of approximately five billion liters of water by its manufacturing facilities;
- introducing the Dream Machine recycling initiative, to provide greater access to on-the-go recycling receptacles and help increase the U.S. beverage container recycling rate from 34 percent to 50 percent, by 2018;
- launching a groundbreaking pilot program, using low-carbon fertilizers that drastically reduce Tropicana’s lifecycle carbon footprint; and
- Walkers becoming the first company in the world to display a carbon reduction logo on a consumer product, representing a commitment to become more sustainable and transparent.
