Coca-Cola to double amount of recycled plastic in its bottles by 2020
Company hails 'bold ambition' but campaigners say change does not go far enough
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Your support makes all the difference.Coca-Cola is to increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50 per cent, the company has announced – a doubling of the current amount of 25 per cent.
The new target will be reached by 2020 and comes as drinks manufacturers face increasing pressure to make their products more environmentally friendly.
One million plastic bottles are purchased worldwide every minute – a total of 480 billion each year. Around 100 billion of these are thought to be Coca-Cola bottles.
The company, whose brands include Fanta, Sprite, Oasis, Lilt and Schweppes in addition to its traditional cola drink, said it will invest millions of pounds in buying recycled plastic from “Europe’s largest and most advanced plastic bottle recycling facility” in Lincolnshire in order to meet its new target.
It means a Coca-Cola bottle could be recycled and returned to the shelf in its new form within six weeks.
Jon Woods, general manager of Coca-Cola Britain, told The Guardian: “Doubling the amount of recycled material in all of our plastic bottles is a significant investment and sends a clear signal we want to play a positive role in supporting the circular economy here in Great Britain”
The company is also investing in an advertising campaign, set to reach 35 million people in Britain, to encourage people to recycle their bottles. It will also look at working with the Government to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme.
However, campaigners said the measures did not go far enough,
“Other companies are already at 5 per cent and are aiming to be at 100 per cent by 2020," said Jon Sauven, head of Greenpeace UK. “Coca-Cola is huge in scale and this is not an ambitious target.”
Coca-Cola said it cannot currently raise its target further because there “isn’t enough food-grade quality recycled plastic available in the UK”.
Campaigners say drinks companies do not want to use 100 per cent recycled bottles because they do not look as good and brands fear they may put consumers off.
While all Coca-Cola bottles are recyclable, few are actually recycled . In Great Britain alone, almost half (43 per cent) are not recycled and the figure will be significantly lower in many countries, where recycling facilities are rarer or non-existent.
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