Major drinks brands Carlsberg, Coca-Cola and Danone are supporting the work of a renewable chemicals company to make plant-based biodegradable bottles. The alternative plastic will be manufactured from sustainably grown crops in a process that uses plant sugar instead of fossil fuels such as oil.
The pioneering company, Avantium, says cardboard bottles with an inner layer of the ‘plant plastic’ could be trialled by Carlsberg soon. Other household names are lined up to back the project, which is seeking investment to scale up production at its bioplastics facility in the Netherlands.
If the new material does end up replacing the plastic currently used for drinks bottles, it would be a double win for the environment: because current plastic drinks bottles are made from fossil fuels, which contributes to global warming, while the dumping of the durable bottles causes plastic pollution on land and in the sea for hundreds of years.
The new bioplastic will be recyclable as well as biodegradable, and will be strong enough to store carbonated drinks – a hitherto major stumbling block in the search for an alternative to durable plastic. Initially made from wheat, corn and beet sugars, the new bottles will hopefully be on shelves by 2023, and the company says that in the future, when production is increased to meet growing demand, it will switch the source material from crops to biowaste in order to make the bottles even more sustainable.
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Major drinks brands Carlsberg, Coca-Cola and Danone are supporting the work of a renewable chemicals company to make plant-based biodegradable bottles. The alternative plastic will be manufactured from sustainably grown crops in a process that uses plant sugar instead of fossil fuels such as oil.
The pioneering company, Avantium, says cardboard bottles with an inner layer of the ‘plant plastic’ could be trialled by Carlsberg soon. Other household names are lined up to back the project, which is seeking investment to scale up production at its bioplastics facility in the Netherlands.
If the new material does end up replacing the plastic currently used for drinks bottles, it would be a double win for the environment: because current plastic drinks bottles are made from fossil fuels, which contributes to global warming, while the dumping of the durable bottles causes plastic pollution on land and in the sea for hundreds of years.
The new bioplastic will be recyclable as well as biodegradable, and will be strong enough to store carbonated drinks – a hitherto major stumbling block in the search for an alternative to durable plastic. Initially made from wheat, corn and beet sugars, the new bottles will hopefully be on shelves by 2023, and the company says that in the future, when production is increased to meet growing demand, it will switch the source material from crops to biowaste in order to make the bottles even more sustainable.