PETpla.net Insider 11 / 2019

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 11/19 www.petpla.net 36 Recycling marine plastics Ocean clean-up A partnership including Coca-Cola Corporation, Indorama Ventures, Ioniqa Technologies and Mares Circulares has successfully produced a PET bottle using recovered and recycled marine plastics. The partners say that this demonstrates that even ocean debris could be used in producing food and beverage packaging. The Coca-Cola Company has unveiled its first-ever bottles made using recovered and recycled marine plastics. In so doing, it has demon- strated that even ocean debris could, in future, be recycled for use in pack- aging for food and beverages. The ‘marine plastic bottle’ has been developed by a partnership between The Coca-Cola Company, Ioniqa Technologies, Indorama Ven- tures and Mares Circulares (Circular Seas). Around 300 sample bottles were made using 25% recycled marine plastic, retrieved from the oceans and beaches by volunteers who participated in 84 beach clean-ups in Spain and Portu- gal, and by fishermen in 12 ports across the Mediterranean Sea, as part of the Mares Circulares or “Circular Seas” project, which is partly funded by the Coca-Cola foundation and is a collaboration between the Coca-Cola system in Iberia; Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food & the Environment; and three leading non-profit organizations: Chelonia Association, Ecomar Foundation and Vertidos Cero Association. Investing in technology In January 2019 Coca-Cola extended a loan to Ioniqa Tech- nologies in the Netherlands, to help scale its proprietary enhanced recy- cling technology. The marine litter collected through Mares Circulares was recycled by Ioniqa Technolo- gies, using its 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 mate- rial into the PET plastic required to make the first Coca-Cola bottle (and the world’s first drinking bottle) made with marine plastics. Indo- rama is establishing a track record for taking on and completing very challenging recycling tasks. Earlier in 2019, Indorama announced that it would be opening a plant in Guada- lajara, Mexico, that would be capable of recycling, to food-grade standard, plastic recovered from landfill. Proof of concept The marine plastic bottle has been developed as proof of concept for what enhanced recycling technolo- gies may be capable of achieving. These technologies use newly-devel- oped processes that break down the components of plastic and strip out impurities in lower-grade recyclables, enabling them to be rebuilt to ‘as new’ standards. This means that lower grade plastics, usually destined for incineration or landfill, can be reused. It also extends the reserves of materi- als available to make recycled content and helps to reduce the amount of virgin PET needed to be produced from fossil fuels, thus contributing to a lower carbon footprint. Scaling up In the immediate future, enhanced recycling will be introduced at com- mercial scale using waste from exist- ing recyclers, including previously unrecyclable plastics and lower-qual- ity recyclables. Bruno van Gompel, Technical and Supply Chain Director, Coca-Cola Western Europe, says the potential for the technology is huge. “Enhanced recycling technolo- gies are enormously exciting, not just for us but for industry and society at large,” he said. “They accelerate the prospect of a closed-loop economy for plastic, which is why we are invest- ing in them. As these begin to scale,