Coca-Cola Applies Recycled PET Bottles... "Contains 10% Recycled Plastic"

Used PET bottles return in 'Bottle to Bottle'
Recycled PET usage and applicable products to continue expanding

Korea Coca-Cola announced on the 24th that it has launched the recycled PET (r-PET) product ‘Coca-Cola Recycled Bottle,’ which contains 10% recycled plastic safely made from beverage PET bottles used domestically, applied to the existing Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero 1.25L products.

Last year, the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety improved regulations and prepared related standards to allow the use of physically recycled PET bottles in food containers, enabling ‘bottle-to-bottle’ recycling of transparent beverage PET bottles back into beverage PET bottles domestically. Korea Coca-Cola will be the first to apply recycled PET bottle packaging to one of its main products, the ‘Coca-Cola 1.25ℓ’ commercial-use product.

Considering that Coca-Cola is the first to attempt bottle-to-bottle recycling domestically, it decided to apply 10% recycled PET to the first production batch. The recycled PET bottles are made through a physical processing process that washes, crushes, and heats transparent PET bottles separately collected in Korea in accordance with the Ministry of Environment’s standards, melting them into a liquid state, and have been approved by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety for use in manufacturing food containers.

Along with this, while maintaining product quality and safety, the package weight was reduced from the existing 41g to 36g through lightweighting, reducing the amount of virgin plastic used per bottle by about 21% (8.6g) compared to before. Additionally, the package shape was changed to the easily recognizable Coca-Cola contour bottle design to strengthen brand identity.

Coca-Cola has already been implementing a sustainable packaging strategy focused on expanding the use of recycled materials globally. As of 2022, it uses 15% recycled plastic worldwide and offers 100% recycled PET bottle products in at least one brand in more than 40 countries. Since ‘bottle-to-bottle’ recycling has just been introduced in Korea, the first product applies 10% recycled PET considering consumer awareness of recycled materials and infrastructure development for securing recycled raw materials, with plans to gradually increase the amount of recycled PET used and expand the product lineup.

A representative of Korea Coca-Cola said, “With the launch of the ‘Coca-Cola 1.25L product’ using 10% recycled plastic domestically, the era of a plastic circular economy in Korea has officially begun. We will accelerate the development of sustainable packaging to ensure that bottle-to-bottle recycling of beverage PET bottles is well established and spread domestically, and strive to create positive changes together with the government and consumers.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.