Coke's New PlantBottle Hits the Shelves

Updating a story we brought you back in November, the plans announced last fall by Coca-Cola Co. to market their products in more environmentally friendly packaging is now a reality.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Coke's progress in the successful development and launch of their PlantBottle is just the beginning, with a major marketing effort expected to tie in to the upcoming Winter Olympics, and hopes to step up the use of the new bottle dramatically during the course of 2010.

As Tonic reported in November, the global soft drink giant was motivated to rethink their packaging as brighter light was being shed on the matter of plastic's pervasive and persistent presence in the global environment. Their PlantBottle, which substitutes plant based material for traditional plastic, represents an effort to reduce oil consumption and minimize the carbon footprint of their products' packaging.

As The Journal reports, the PlantBottle is composed of 70% conventional plastic with the remaining 30 percent of the mass coming from polymers derived from sugar cane. Coke is currently working with an independent, third-party certification body they hope will verify their claim that the new bottle represents a carbon footprint improvement that may approach a 20 percent reduction in impact.

Introduced in Copenhagen during the COP15 United Nations climate conference in December, Coke is currently selling Dasani water in the updated packaging in the western US. The Winter Olympics in Vancouver that kick off in less than one month will see all Coke products sold at the event being delivered in the PlantBottle. By the end of 2010, the company projects that it will have sold two billion units with the new packaging innovation.

Photo courtesy of Oop via flicker