Coca-Cola Has Come Up With A New Sustainable Paper Bottles For Trials

Coca-cola is ready for its paper bottle trials this summer.

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Plastic pollution is a threat to our planet. And consumers now demand more sustainable products, hence forcing brands to make important changes to their products.

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Coca-cola has been ranked as the worst polluting brand. It has been named so for years in a row now.

To fulfill the earlier promises, Coca-cola has now released a paradigm of sustainable paper bottles, that might help decrease plastic pollution.

The project has been carried out in collaboration with a Danish company Paboco, the Paper Bottle Company, which manufactures recyclable packaging for products.

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The project did come with some challenges. One is just like the paper straws’––– how the bottle will hold the drink without preventing the soda from soaking the bottle and destroying it? To solve this issue they have used a thin plastic liner in the paper shell, making a barrier between the paper and the liquid.

“It’s going to be a bio-based barrier, that’s really something minimal, that keeps that food-safe, that keeps the product safe at the same time,” explains Michael Michelsen, business development manager at Paboco.

Another challenge is withstanding the pressure that is to be added while bottling soda. The bottle has to be airtight to prevent gas from leaving or anything falling into the soda. Also, the paper needs to be mouldable, to make different bottle shapes and sizes for different brands, and take ink for printing their labels.

All these challenges did not come with easy solutions, and to overcome these, it took them 7 years of experiments before launching.

And finally, the testing is to be done in Hungary this Summer. The trial will be done by selling Coca-Cola’s fruit drink Adez. The first batch includes 2,000 bottles, all will be sold in a local retail chain.

“We have a good understanding already of what the bottle will go through as we put it into the real world,” says Michelsen. “But there is a certain point where you just can’t design yourself out of this at a desk, right? ”

So the paper bottles are not in the market yet, but with the first test, and Coca-Cola, Paboco, and other companies improving the technology behind paper bottles, the day is not far where these sustainable bottles will be used more than the plastic ones.