Coke wants to encourage customers to recycle caps with the bottles.
For decades now, plastic waste has been a major enduring environmental concern all over the world. Plastic products end up landfills, either taking up space or worse, tearing into microplastics that harm local ecosystems. Unsurprisingly, companies that use a lot of plastic are under the most scrutiny for solving this problem, and one company that gets a lot of heat is Coca-Cola.
Recently, Coke’s UK-based arm unveiled a new idea to encourage at least a slight reduction in plastic waste. In a minor adjustment of the traditional plastic bottle with a plastic cap, UK Coke bottles will start utilizing caps that are directly attached to the neck of the bottle. The idea here is to tether the cap and bottle together in order to encourage consumers to recycle both at the same time.
“This is a small change that we hope will have a big impact, ensuring that when consumers recycle our bottles, no cap gets left behind,” Jon Woods, general manager at Coca-Cola Great Britain, said in a statement.
NEW COKE CAPS | The new bottles feature an attached cap, a design that is supposed to make it easier to recycle the whole package at once — and keep caps out of the trash. https://t.co/4uOSrsd4QG
— Island News (@KITV4) May 19, 2022
Coke estimates that all bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero, as well as Coke-adjacent beverages like Fanta, Dr. Pepper, and Sprite, will start using the new design by 2024. No word has been given yet whether this will be a UK-exclusive development, or if it will be rolled out to the global market. The change is part of Coke’s ongoing “World Without Waste” initiative, which hopes to have Coke bottles and cans constructed of at least 50% recyclable material by 2030, plus 100% recyclable packaging by 2025.