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Tinted PET Screws Up Recycling, so Coca-Cola Goes Clear with Packaging

A PET peeve of recyclers

By Rain Noe - February 11

Generally speaking, wine and beer come in green and brown bottles. The tinted glass prevents UV rays from oxidizing the wine and skunking up the beer.

Image credit: Oscar Nord on Unsplash

However, there's no reason beyond brand identity to put Sprite in green-tinted plastic bottles.

And it turns out that tinted PET actually screws up recycling streams.

Image credit: Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Colorless PET is what purchasers of recycled plastic want, whereas no one has any use for the tinted stuff.

Good stuff in the middle (Image credit: Michal Manas)

As a result, recyclers have to add an expensive additional sorting step to divide different colors of PET, to avoid contaminating the clear PET bales of recycled material; and they get no return on their investment for baling up the blue and green stuff, because no one wants it.

No one wants us (Image credit: Matthewdikmans)

That's why Japanese beverage makers phased out colored PET, way back in 2001. When neighboring South Korea followed suit, they found they doubled their recycling rate to 70%, according to Plastics News.

Here in 2021, Coca-Cola is finally catching up, and phasing out green PET for the Sprite brand. They've also announced that they're transitioning to 100% recycled PET across all brands. Better late than never.

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Tinted PET Screws Up Recycling, so Coca-Cola Goes Clear with Packaging

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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.