Comments on: Coca-Cola Cans its Old Image With New PlantBottle

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:45:22 +0000

I don’t even see it as much of an issue anymore. We’ve got recycling bins everywhere you look, some places even ask patrons to keep glass seperate from plastic.
Everyone seems to have been trained farily well with the local “blue box” programs in every major center.
By the way, why should we stop at glass bottles for Coke? Why not milk and juice? Tetra packs are claimed to be recycleable, but get real.. there’s metal and papers mixed together, seperating them is a pain.
No, the best answer for the ReduceReuseRecycle is to reuse as much as possible. Get rid of the paper and plastics, bring in the glass…

By: Clinton

Clinton — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:33:13 +0000

Dahlia, that is a great point!

As long as glass bottles are refilled at local refilling stations and are continuously recycled they definitely are the way to go. Glass recycling is fully sustainable and glass itself is 100-percent recyclable. You can use it over and over again with no loss of purity or quality.

Glass recycling is also efficient. It has a proven history and is completely dependable. Apparently, 80 percent of all recycled glass eventually ends up as new glass containers. That sounds like a great track record to me!

The only problem I see with it – is getting people to recycle it regularly.

By: Dahlia

Dahlia — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:39:12 +0000

I will remain sceptic until the people at Coke provide real proof it is a greener product…
Case in point, all polyethylene products are supposedly recyclable, yet egg ‘cartons’ cannot be recycled with bottles, even though both are number 1 plastics, because the egg boxes are molded at a different temperature than that of the bottles, and therefore is no longer the exact same polymer.

Photo-degradable plastics (oxo-biodegradable) are supposed to be recyclable, yet there are no facilities anywhere to process them, so they end up in the regular waste stream. Biodegradable plastics cannot be recycled with other plastics since they would render any subsequent product biodegradable (imagine your new recycled plastic lawn furniture crumbling under the summer sun… not pretty).

Personally, I think we should go back to refillable and endlessly reusable glass bottles, filled at a local refilling station, like in the ‘old days’. Cut down on transportation, create new jobs, re-open the bottling plants across thecontinent, including the one in PEI that closed two years ago.

By: Clinton

Clinton — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:47:42 +0000

Edible – that would be awesome! hehe

Since the new bottles are partially made from plants, Coke claims they reduce their dependence on petroleum. And I believe that the bottles are 100 percent recyclable. Cokes research indicates that the carbon footprint for the PlantBottle packaging is smaller than bottles made with traditional PET which is a thermoplastic polymer.

I don’t even like say that word.. ther-mo-plastic polymer. Yuck!

By: Dahlia

Dahlia — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:25:49 +0000

And how do we dispose of these ‘green’ bottles? Are they biodegradable, compostable, or even recyclable, or perhaps edible?