Coca Cola has a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability program. In my hometown, the local Coca Cola bottling plant has a new hybrid electric truck for local deliveries.
In mid-January Coca Cola opened the world's largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C. It will have the capacity to make 100 million pounds of recycled PET plastic chips or enough to produce 2 billion 20-ounce plastic bottles. PET stands for polyethylene and is labeled as #1.
It is the most recycled plastic of all the types out there but only about 25% of that is recycled. Most beverage bottles are made of PET (or PETE). Coca Cola’s goal is sustainable consumption and sustainable packaging.
This facility will take plastic bottles from the Northeast to Florida and recycle them. Making money at recycling has been a problem for years, but they hope this plant will make money with improved technology and manufacturing processes. If they make money, more plants will open. Coca Cola is sincerely trying to do something about needless waste.
While I applaud them, I have some problems with this. I have a feeling that recycling plants like this are a good way to reduce plastic waste - in combination with other approaches. I worry that it will cause consumers to increase their consumption of plastic bottles - not reduce it. After all, the bottles will be recycled. I worry that it only encourages the throw-away mentality. Is it a license to consume? Plastic can only be recycled a few times and then it hangs around for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Also, how useful are most of their products; like soft drinks, bottled water, and Vitamin Water? Soft drinks are like liquid candy and contribute to our nations epidemic of obesity. Bottled water is not better than public water. Vitamin Water is currently being sued by the Center for Science in the Public Interest for making claims that are probably false. Each 20 oz. bottle has 125 calories, as bad as any soft drink. If Coca Cola made products that really were good for us and needed by us, I would be more enthusiastic about their efforts to be greener.
I remember when Cokes came in reusable glass bottles. You could collect them and get a nickel for each one. They were sent back to the bottling plant, cleaned and reused. You never saw reusable bottles littering the environment. Those were the good ol' days!
