Coke, JBF Plan World’s Largest Bi-Glycol Facility for PlantBottle

by | Oct 1, 2012

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The Coca-Cola Company today announced a partnership with JBF Industries Ltd. to further expand production of the plant-based material used in the company’s PlantBottle packaging.

To support this partnership, JBF Industries Ltd. will build the world’s largest facility for the production of bi-glycol, the key ingredient used in the manufacture of the plant bottle.

The facility, which will be located in Araraquara, Sao Paulo, Brazil, will produce the ingredient using locally sourced sugarcane and sugarcane processing waste. Both materials meet The Coca-Cola Company’s established sustainability criteria used to identify plant-based ingredients for PlantBottle packaging.

Construction on the new facility is expected to begin at the end of this year and last for two years.  At full capacity, it is estimated the facility will produce 500,000 metric tons of material per year. By using plant-based materials instead of non-renewable materials, the facility will remove the equivalent of 690,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of consuming more than 1.5 million barrels of oil each year, JBF says.

PlantBottle packaging is currently available in more than 24 countries worldwide and across a wide variety of Coca-Cola products. Since the package launched in 2009, its use has eliminated the equivalent of almost 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions – the equivalent of 200,000 barrels of oil – from The Coca-Cola Company’s PET plastic packaging, JBF says.

In December 2011, renewable chemicals and biofuels firm Gevo Inc. reached an agreement with The Coca-Cola Company to supply renewable para-xylene for the beverage giant’s bottles.

The para-xylene is to be made from plant-based isobutanol and will be used in the manufacture of Coke’s second generation PlantBottle.

The work will take the technology from lab-scale to commercial-scale. In this next generation of PlantBottle packaging, Coca-Cola plans to produce bottles entirely from renewable raw materials.

In April last year, Coke began rolling out 100 percent recyclable display racks for its drinks, in what it called an industry first. The “Give it Back racks”, freestanding units made of corrugated cardboard, are designed for use in grocery and convenience stores. Coca-Cola said the racks were a first step toward a comprehensive, closed-loop retail equipment program, in which the company will recover displays and reuse or recycle them.

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