Coca-Cola announced its first-ever sample bottle made using recovered and recycled marine plastics. This sample is the first-ever plastic bottle made using marine litter that has been successfully recycled and reused in food and drink packaging. About 300 sample bottles have been produced using 25% recycled marine plastic retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea and beaches.

The sample bottle is the result of a partnership between Ioniqa Technologies, Indorama Ventures, Mares Circulares (Circular Seas) and The Coca-Cola Company. Although enhanced recycling is still in its infancy, the partners produced the sample marine plastic bottle as a proof of concept for what the technology may achieve in time.

In January 2019, Coca-Cola extended a loan to Ioniqa Technologies in the Netherlands to help scale its proprietary enhanced recycling technology.  The marine litter collected through Mares Circulares was recycled by Ioniqa Technologies, using enhanced recycling processes, back into the building blocks needed to make food-grade PET.

Indorama Ventures, one of Coca-Cola’s suppliers of PET plastic and packaging solutions, subsequently converted this material into the PET plastic required to make the first sample Coca-Cola bottle made with marine plastic.

In the immediate term, enhanced recycling will be introduced at commercial scale using waste streams from existing recyclers, including previously unrecyclable plastics and lower-quality recyclables. From 2020, Coca-Cola plans to roll out this enhanced recycled content in some of its bottles.