Cheers to Pepsi Co., which announced today that it has developed the world's first plant-derived pop bottle. Although it doesn't look any different than the current plastic bottles the company uses, the new ones are made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and "other materials" (that we assume are plan-based but too obscure and perhaps gross-out worthy to mention.) Pepsi says it will use biproducts of its food business—including orange peels, oat hulls and potato scraps—to make the bottles, too.
The stuff inside the bottles, on the other hand, will continue to be a witch's brew composed primarily of "nasty chemicals" (to quote my mother, who says there's too much sugar [worse! corn syrup] in regular soda, and too much aspartame that'll give me cancer in diet versions.)
Despite my mother's concerns, I still drink a lot of diet Pepsi (deal with it!), and the new bottles are good news.
"PepsiCo plans to test the product in 2012 in a few hundred thousand bottles. Once the company is sure it can successfully produce the bottle at that scale, it will begin converting all its products over," reports the Huffington Post.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola Co., which makes bottles using 30% plant-derived materials, recently stated, rather erroneously, that it'd likely be several years before they could make a commercially viable, totally plant-based bottle. So much for that theory!
Pepsi already earned earth brownie points for creating the first compostable chip bag, for SunChips. Why they don't put all their chips in similar bags is beyond me ... but hey, it's a baby step in the right direction. And they did cut a lot of the plastic out of their Aqua-Fina bottles in 2009 (saves them money, saves the earth... everybody wins!). And according to the Huffington Post, Pepsi is in the midst of transitioning Naked Juice branded drinks into bottles made from 100% recycled plastic.
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