Coca-Cola is transitioning the brand to clear plastic bottles on August 1. By October, the company will do the same for Fresca, Mello Yello, and Seagram's.
Turns out, green plastic isn't green in the environmental sense. A colored bottle contaminates the recycling stream and has to be separated out, increasing the chances it ends up in a landfill. There's not a big market for green plastic either, so recyclers can't make much money selling it off to be made into new packaging.
"By making our bottles clear — a huge change for the brand — it makes them much more likely to go through the recycling system and come back to us as recycled PET," said Chris Vallette, senior vice president of technical innovation and stewardship, citing an industry term for the plastic used to make bottles. in countries like the US, Canada, and India to protect oceans and tackle climate change.
For its part, Coca-Cola has a World Without Waste initiative to make 100% of its packaging recyclable and get a bottle back for each one it sells by 2030. The beverage giant also pledged that half of its packaging will be made from recycled materials in the same timeframe. To support that goal, Coca-Cola will make Dasani bottles sold in the US and Canada from 100% recycled plastic, avoiding an estimated 10,000 tons of virgin plastic next year alone.