Coca-Cola Introducing New Bottle Caps to Reduce Plastic Pollution

Matilda Omonaiye/

Coca-Cola said it would introduce packaging that keeps plastic caps attached to bottles when opened to make it easier for consumers to recycle drinks packaging in its entirety, according to a report by WSJ.

Plastic bottle caps can be recycled but are often lost, discarded or end up as litter, Coca-Cola said in a statement. The new design aims to reduce that, the company said.

The hinged lids started rolling out yesterday on 1.5-liter bottles of Fanta, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar and Diet Coke in Scotland, and all plastic bottles across Coca-Cola’s brands will adopt the new design in the U.K. by 2024, the company said.

Coca-Cola will work with bottling partners to eventually phase the design into production lines across Europe, a company spokesman said.

“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.

The design is part of Coca-Cola’s strategy to help create a “circular economy” for its plastic products amid regulation and calls to reduce the amount of its plastic packaging that ends up in landfills and elsewhere.

Coca-Cola has said it has a responsibility to help solve what it calls the world’s plastics problem and has announced plans to use at least 50% recycled material in its packaging by 2030. It also plans to make its packaging 100% recyclable by 2025 as part of its World Without Waste environmental program introduced in 2018.

Coca-Cola’s focus has been on encouraging recycling, rather than eliminating its use of plastic outright, because consumers like lightweight single-use bottles they can seal, company sustainability chief Beatriz Perez, told the BBC in 2020.

Coca-Cola’s European business first tested attached caps in Spain in 2021 in a pilot program as the European Union’s directive on single-use plastics came into effect. Single-use plastic beverage containers are permitted in the EU, but starting in 2024 the bottles must reduce the “dispersal of container caps and lids made of plastic into the environment” through designs such as hinged caps, the directive says.

Meanwhile, the U.K. last month introduced a tax on plastic packaging that doesn’t contain at least 30% recycled plastic. The levy also applies to imported materials.

Environmental organizations have long singled out Coca-Cola for its contribution to plastic waste globally.

The nonprofit coalition Break Free From Plastic last October named Coca-Cola for the fourth consecutive year as the world’s worst plastic polluter, and in its annual report said the company’s recycling pledge is “having little impact on the environmental pollution caused by their products.”

Coca-Cola’s attached caps are a distraction from the problem of plastics pollution, said Graham Forbes, global plastics project lead at environmental advocacy group Greenpeace USA.

“The world is drowning in Coca-Cola’s plastic pollution and this will not change that,” he said, adding the company should concentrate on developing systems for consumers to reuse and refill bottles.

Coca-Cola wants to use less packaging where it can and to see all packaging it uses collected, reused or recycled, a company spokesman said.

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