Coke’s PlantBottle – Coca Cola invests further in scaling Virent’s paraxylene production

Posted by Narasimhan Santhanam on January 22, 2015

It always gives a huge amount of confidence when a global corporate major invests significantly in clean technology.

Thus it was a sense of satisfaction I got when I read about Coca Cola’s scaling up of its involvement in sustainable materials through its investments in bioplastic bottles.

In 2014, Coca Cola extended its partnership with a Wisconsin based company, Virent. Virent’s partnership is to be extended with an additional investment of an undisclosed amount for Viret to scale up production of the paraxylene, a chemical which Coca Cola is using in their PlantBottles.

The investment will fund purchase and installation of new equipment that is needed to chemically produce and purify paraxylene from one of the byproducts of Virent’s biofuel production process.

The companies partnered in 2011, signing multi-year, multi-million dollar agreements to scale-up Virent’s plant-based Paraxylene as a route to commercially viable, 100% renewable, 100% recyclable PlantBottle PET resin. In the past, Coca Cola’s PlantBottles have included only 30% plant-based plastic. Virent’s chemical allows the remaining 70% of the bottle to be plant-based.

Encouraging stuff, read more from here

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Narasimhan Santhanam

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