Plant-Based Bottles by PepsiCo and Coke are Plastic
Extremely sorry to let you know that we can’t rely on plant-based PET bottles to solve our plastic woes any more.
Some recent reports indicate that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s plant-based bottles are just the very same plastic. The companies have merely replaced the fossil fuels (petroleum and natural gas) traditionally used to make their plastic bottles with ethanol from renewable sources (plant waste in Pepsi’s case and Brazilian sugar cane in Coke’s).
Though these initial inputs come from renewable, lower-carbon sources, the resulting plastics are chemically identical to the polyethylene terepthalate, or PET,and high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, that regular plastic bottles are made of. No doubt, these are as harmful as their petroleum-based predecessors.
The study highlights that Pepsi and Coke are using plants to make the same polymers we find in other plastics and it has zero effect on plastic pollution. Besides, the bottles made from ethanol contain phthalates and bisphenol A, which can be associated with obesity, autism, and various types of cancer. Bio-resins may be recyclable, but new Pepsi and Coke bottles are neither biodegradable nor recycled.
It needs to be noted that companies like Naked Juice, Naya Water, and Eldorado Water have been already on the path of green by using bottles made from 100% recycled materials. Unfortunately, PepsiCo’s and Coke’s green bottles turned out to be a mere hollow green façade!
(via Slate)
Hate plastics if you like; but get your facts straight. PET resin used for small water or soda bottles does NOT contain BPA or phthalates! Does not now and never has! A diffeent plastic, Polycarbonate is made using BPA and is not used for soda bottles. Coke and Pepsi soda bottles are recycled every day. Yes the PET made from these new “renewable technoligies” make the same PET and that is a good thing because they can be recycled in the existing recycling stream already reclaimin nearly a billion pounds per year.