The Coca-Cola Company has formed a partnership with Mumbai, India based packaging company, JBF Industries to further expand production of the plant-based material used in its recyclable PlantBottle packaging.
The beverage giant said that the supply partnership will help it bring renewable, lower-carbon plastics to the marketplace and move the company closer to its target of using PlantBottle packaging technology in all of its plastic bottles by 2020.
“In 2009, we introduced the world to our PlantBottle package - the first recyclable PET plastic bottle made partially from plants. Today, Coca-Cola has sold more than 10 billion PlantBottle packages around the world,” explained Ronald J Lewis, vice president, Procurement & chief procurement officer at The Coca-Cola Company.
To support the partnership, JBF will build the world’s largest facility to produce bio-glycol - the key ingredient used to make PlantBottle packaging.
The facility, which will be located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, will produce the ingredient using locally sourced sugarcane and sugarcane processing waste.
Coca-Cola said that both materials meet its established sustainability criteria used to identify plant-based ingredients for PlantBottle packaging, which include demonstrating improved environmental and social performance as well as avoiding negative impacts on food security.
Construction on the new facility, which will produce some 500,000 tonnes of material per year, is expected to begin at the end of this year and last for 24 months.
