Coca-Cola Corporation broke new ground when it announced it was using plant materials to make its PlantBottles in 2009. The company’s global general manager of PlantBottle, Scott Vitters, took time out from his participation at the recent Enviro2012 conference in Adelaide to speak to Roland Tellzen on the company’s past, present and future bio-bottle plans.
Late last year Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), the local bottling franchisee for the giant global Coca-Cola Corporation, quietly introduced its bio-material-based PlantBottle to the Australian market in a “soft” launch ahead of widespread distribution on retail shelves this year.
Surprisingly, for a development it trumpeted far and wide at its global launch in 2009, the low-key introduction of the bottle in the Australian market has been given little, if any publicity by the company, and attracted miniscule attention from consumers and the media. And this is how Coca-Cola Corporation’s global general manager for the PlantBottle project, and its former director of sustainable packaging, Scott Vitters, likes it.
“The thing that is interesting with the innovation, is that it looks like the traditional material we’ve long used for our bottles, and it is able to do everything the old packaging does,” Vitters tells PKN.
“In fact, to all intents and purposes, it is still made of PET plastic. The important thing for us when we developed it was not to look for an entirely new plastic, but to have the same bottle. We wanted the same look and feel, but just replacing some of the materials used to make it,” he said.
Vitters was speaking to PKN during a break at the Enviro2012 conference in Adelaide in July, during which he presented a keynote on the path the company took to produce the bottle, and its future plans for the technology globally and in Australia.
At its launch, Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle was hailed as a breakthrough moment in sustainable packaging, with the world’s biggest beverage company using plant-derived materials to replace a third of the fossil fuel-derived chemicals usually used to produce PET.
This was achieved by replacing the ethyleneglycol, one of the two main ingredients in producing PET plastic (the other being terephthalic acid) with materials derived from plant sugars (in the PlantBottle's case, from cane sugar sourced in Brazil).
Vitters explains to PKN that the company sees this as only the starting point in a long-term plan to make the bottle 100 per cent plant material-derived within the next several years.
“Even when we made the announcement of the PlantBottle in 2009, we already had a road map to do a 100 per cent plant-based bottle down the track,” he says.
“But in our first generation, we had to be content replacing just one of the two key ingredients in PET, and that ingredient makes up about a third of the weight of PET.
“So we were limited by science in how just much plant material we could use. But that certainly doesn’t mean we’re not working to go even better.”
Since the bottle’s introduction, it has been introduced for Coca-Cola products in some 24 countries around the world.
This represents about 10 billion Coca-Cola products to date hitting shelves using the PlantBottle, Vitters says.
“It is not about doing it in a lab or with a limited test run of 1000 bottles any more... It is doing it through a program targeting billions of consumers worldwide,” he says.
Vitters explains that the strategy the company took in the bottle’s development was detailed and careful, and designed to stick as far as possible to a number of key principles.
“As far as the innovation itself, we were guided by the notion that we didn’t want to develop an entirely new plastic,” he says.
“Yes, we changed the ingredients, but throughout the PET chain, from manufacturer down to consumer to the recycler, the experience stays the same for all.
“Chemically, it is exactly the same as PET.”
Vitters says that while the company was willing to devote the resources and capital investment necessary to get the project off the ground, it was always determined that in the long-term it would need to be financially sustainable.
“It is not about having to build an entirely new value chain. We were willing to pay the implementation cost, and in the short term there was a significant cost, but we had a very clear line of site it would be competitive in the future,” he explains.
This consideration of the economic viability of the project also extended to how it would source its plant materials, Vitters says.
“It [the project] could not compete with the food chain,” he says. “Coke has an in-built incentive not to run up the prices of sugars and starches around the world – sugars are our key ingredients, it would be silly to drive up the prices.”
To this end, he says, the company has worked to ensure varied sources for the biomatter to be used in the bottles.
To date, for example, while the company has mainly used materials derived from sugar cane from Brazil, it is also starting to look beyond to other sources and countries.
“We have expanded into using molasses from India,” Vitters says. “We are also doing a lot of work on plant waste sugars, which is where we see a lot of work in the future, taking the waste like stems and stalks, and using them for biomass applications.”
Such an approach also gives flexibility to the company’s numerous international bottling franchisees, he says.
“We are fundamentally a local business operated by franchised operators – we have 3500 different products being offered through 300 independent bottlers around the world, and we are hoping to use different feedstocks in these different markets.
“So, what is most locally relevant, say, to Australia or India or South America will decide the feedstocks we use.”
Vitters said that as far as keeping the project economically viable was concerned, the company realised early on this would mean it would have to share the technology and sign on partners.
This strategy bore fruit last year when Coca-Cola convinced another global food giant, Heinz, to start using the plant-based PET in its tomato sauce packaging.
“That has been a great benefit for the project because it means they can now help us build up the supply chain, so it’s not just a supply chain for a single company,” he says.
“It helps solve the big challenge, which is how does this become cost competitive against a commoditised product like PET.
“And just a month ago we announced we were creating a collaborative group to work on plant PET, and we have partnered with companies like Nike, Ford, Procter & Gamble and Heinz to do that,” he says. “We will work together to advance the technology by using other ingredients to increase its green properties.”
“It is a new way to approach innovation, by sharing the value and developing the technology faster,” he says.
“It means the project now is bigger than Coca-Cola.”
Also brought in last year were three new technology partners, research companies Virent, Gevo and Avantium, to help Coca-Cola achieve its long-term goal – a bottle made of 100 per cent plant-based materials.
“They will be able to help us get to 100 per cent, which is our goal by 2020,” Vitters says. “It is exciting not only in terms of creating a positive, meaningful change in our own business, but also across the plastics industry.”
