Thursday, March 17, 2011

Pepsi Will Soon Make All Bottles from Plants

PepsiCo, makers of geek favorite Mountain Dew, is set to deploy bottles made entirely of plant materials in 2012.

Not to get all green on you, but the human race consumes a lot of soda. The resultant waste from millions of plastic bottles fills up landfills and is generally a self-defeating practice that furthers our dependence on fossil fuels because most plastic is petroleum-based. Food manufacturers have experimented with different ways to reduce waste or devise a commercially viable way to create plastic from plants instead of oil, but research has stymied at only using about 30 percent bio-plastic. Pepsi announced that it has finally "cracked the code" and will begin using bottles derived from 100 percent excess plant material - switch grass, pine bark, corn husks, orange peels, oat hulls, and potato scraps. The plan is to produce a few hundred thousand bottles as a test run this year before going full plant-plastic with over a billion bottles sold each year.

Rocco Papalia, an advanced researcher from Pepsi who spent years on the project, said that the bottles made from plants are just like ones you'd find in stores now. "It's a beautiful thing to behold. It's indistinguishable," he said.

Independent scientists are chiming in with what they believe is a packaging revolution. "This is the beginning of the end of petroleum-based plastics," said Allen Hershkowitz from the Natural Resources Defence Council. "When you have a company of this size making a commitment to a plant-based plastic, the market is going to respond."

Pepsi is certainly using the opportunity to slap Coca-Cola in the face with its discovery. Coke, Pepsi's much larger competitor, recently stated that its research was several years away from a 100 percent bioplastic bottle.

12 comments:

  1. Wow thats pretty cool, good read. I love some peopsi, glad to know they will be helping the earth out this way.

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  2. Pepsi is the greeniest company, they are making a new kind of salt, that takes less time to be consumed, and makes things more salty, without using more salt, in fact, less...

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  3. That's fantastic. We really do produce a lot of waste. I hope they got a huge tax writeoff or something for producing this.

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  4. Yay! One of the reasons why i love Pepsi is that they CHANGE their products to suit customers.

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  5. Just another reason why pepsi is superior to coke.

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  6. Oh my i can't believe it's true. We will see.

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  7. This is great hopefully it cuts back on the pollution rate!

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  8. Interesting to know! Although there are times when I just prefer the old fashioned glass bottle of the throwback Pepsi...

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  9. Not the best solution, but it's innovative and has people thinking about new ideas and options.

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  10. It might be a step up to a better solution in the future though.

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