APPE Produces Recycled PET Bottle for Oji Beverage

PET packaging firm APPE, along with beverage maker Oji and consumer-foods group Hero, has produced a 100 percent recycled PET bottle for Oji’s fruit drink.

The new bottle will help the company achieve a closed-loop recycling system as the product can be recycled and reused to make a new rPET bottle. Oji says this fits well with its work with TerraCycle, a recycling company that collects used packaging and products that would otherwise go to landfills.

Last year, Coca-Cola Enterprises invested 6.5 million euros ($8.4 million) in a PET recycling facility and entered into a joint venture in France with APPE to boost the capacity of APPE’s plastics reprocessing facility by 70 percent. Upon completion, the plant should recycle 20,000 additional tons of plastic into food-grade packaging per year, CCE said.

In other sustainable packaging news, late last week Coca-Cola and Ford partnered to use plant-based material as part of the interior fabric on a Ford Fusion Energi plug-in hybrid research vehicle. The Ford research vehicle marks the first time Coke’s PlantBottle Technology is applied beyond PET packaging, which the companies say shows the potential of renewable materials to replace petroleum and other fossil fuels used for traditional PET fabric.