Pepsi vs. Coke Continues with 100% Bio-based Bottle

By Bart King 

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March 15, 2011 – The Coke vs. Pepsi rivalry moved into the environmental arena today, as PepsiCo unveiled its response to Coca-Cola’s much-heralded PlantBottle.

Pepsi said its new “green” bottle is the world’s first PET plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources. The bottle, which will go into pilot production in 2012, is said to be 100% recyclable with petroleum-based PET.

Coke’s PlantBottle, which hit store shelves in 2009, contains up to 30% bio-based material.

Combining biological and chemical processes, Pepsi said it has identified methods to create a molecular structure that is identical to petroleum-based PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which results in a bottle that looks and feels the same as existing PET beverage containers.

The bottle is made from bio-based raw materials, including switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. Pepsi said it will allow the company to significantly reduce its carbon footprint.

In the future, the company said it expects to broaden the renewable sources to include orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its foods business.

“PepsiCo is in a unique position, as one of the world’s largest food and beverage businesses, to ultimately source agricultural byproducts from our foods business to manufacture a more environmentally-preferable bottle for our beverages business–a sustainable business model that we believe brings to life the essence of Performance with Purpose,” said PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi.

Pepsi will pilot production of the new bottle in 2012.  Upon successful completion of the pilot, the company intends to move directly to full-scale commercialization.
“By reducing reliance on petroleum-based materials and using its own agricultural scraps as feedstock for new bottles, this advancement should deliver a double win for the environment and PepsiCo,” said Conrad Mackerron, Senior Program Director of As You Sow, a San Francisco-based foundation, which promotes corporate social responsibility through shareholder engagement.

Bic Makes Recycled Pencil From Old Refrigerator

By Bart King

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March 31, 2011 – Bic, the French manufacturer of pens and cigarette lighters, is using recycled polystyrene from old refrigerators to produce a new line of sustainable pencils, according to Waste & Recycling News.

The polystyrene used to make the “Ecolution” pencils is recycled by Axion Polymers in the UK. In its finished form, the pencil can be sharpened in a typical pencil sharpener and is said to have the same feel as cedar—the wood generally used to make pencils.

Because cedar is such a slow-growing tree, it is not a sustainable material for such a short-lived consumer product, Axion director Keith Freegard said.

“Furthermore, the traditional manufacturing process to produce a graphite-leaded, wooden pencil is slow and involves high levels of wood waste,” he said.

Axion said the polystyrene in a single refrigerator can be used to make about 640 pencils, saving 2,300 metric tons of carbond dioxide emissions in the process.

The recycler worked with Ineos Styrenics to develop the recycling process for Bic. Bic has yet to unveil the new product, which will be marketed to environmentally-conscious consumers.

• The Consumer Electronics Association estimates $165 billion spent on consumer electronics in 2010.
• According to Wirefly.org, the average cell phone user replaces his cell phone every 18 months.
• The EPA reports that over 112,000 computers are discarded every single day. That’s 41 million desktops and laptop computers per year in the U.S. alone.
• 31.9 million units of computer monitors were discarded in 2007, including both CRT and flat panel screens.
• 20 million TVs are trashed in the U.S. every year.
• Americans toss over 100 million cell phones in the trash every year.  It is illegal to throw electronics in the trash in California.
• Only 13% of electronic waste is disposed and recycled properly.

Everyone acknowledges the magnitude of this issue, since heavy metals in electronic scrap material pose a real threat to our environmental health, but very few people know what they can actually do with their obsolete/”not shiny any more” electronic gear.  At One Earth Recycling, you can confidently recycle electronic scrap material free of charge as part of your shopping routine, seven days a week.  We guarantee that all e-scrap is entirely spared from the waste stream, and we guarantee identity security/data destruction in the case of storage devices like hard drives and mobile phones.

OAKLAND, Calif. – You’ve heard of turning water into wine. But what can you turn wine into once the bottle is past its prime?

Plenty say a trio of thrifty chefs who’ve been turning dregs into delicious vinegars, marinades, even sorbets.

“Any good kitchen — waste not, want not,” points out Clark Frasier, co-founder of Arrows Restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine.

Restaurants end up with wine leftovers for a number of reasons, particularly if they sell a lot of it by the glass, something that’s become more popular as consumers have become more cautious about spending. But that trend can leave restaurants with plenty of wine at the bottom of the bottle.

At the Camino restaurant in Oakland, chef/owner Russell Moore uses leftover wine to make his own red wine vinegar and recently started making a white wine vinegar, as well. He hasn’t bought a bottle of vinegar since Camino opened three years ago, though demand has become so high he’s planning on starting up a third barrel so he can age the vinegar longer.

Moore, who worked for 20 years for Alice Water’s famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, has been making his own vinegar for years. The process is fairly simple, he says, though it does require some supervision.

To start, you need “live” vinegar, the clear, plastic-looking stuff that can form at the bottom of a bottle which actually is the “good” bacteria that turn alcohol into vinegar and is known as a “mother.” This can be purchased; Moore got his when he looked at a bottle of vinegar on his counter one day and realized it had produced a mother.

He makes his vinegar in small oak barrels stashed on a shelf in the Camino kitchen. Holes bored in the barrels allow air to pass over the vinegar’s surface. He feeds it the leftover wine and a little water if necessary. And that’s it.

The result is better than most of the commercially available vinegars out there, he says — and way less expensive, something that fits well into the aesthetics of Camino’s no-waste policy.

At Salumeria Rossi in New York City, the rule is simple, says chef Cesare Casella. If there are two glasses left in a bottle of wine, it gets preserved and kept for the next day. “If we have one glass left, they’re going to give it to the kitchen.”

Casella uses the leftover wine to make marinades for dishes like pork loin or lamb shanks.

For Frasier, wine recycling takes an entirely different turn. He uses leftover Champagne, riesling and sweet wines to create granitas and sorbets.

Arrows, which Frasier runs with co-owner and chef Mark Gaier, has had a by-the-glass wine program since it opened more than 20 years ago, so they’re used to dealing with leftovers.

Fortified wines are especially good for sorbets, though the trick is having enough on hand. That’s when you get creative. If Frasier has a little of three different but complementary wines available he might make a trio of sorbets that show off each grape. “It’s an elegant thing to do and it makes it fun and interesting,” he says. “And it’s a great way not to be wasting something that’s very expensive.”

A side-effect of repurposing pinot and other wine leftovers is you find yourself cooking with a storied vintage that normally would never go near a spoon, like a high-end Champagne or Chateau d’Yquem, the famous French dessert wine that can command hundreds a bottle.

Astronauts on the International Space Station will soon be able to drink their own recycled urine using a new system delivered by NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour which launched Friday.

Until now, pee has been dumped overboard, but the new “Water Recovery System” will make sure it doesn’t go to waste, an ability that could be critical to future human space travel.

“Some people may think it’s downright disgusting, but if it’s done correctly, you process water that’s purer than what you drink here on Earth,” said Endeavour mission specialist astronaut
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper in a preflight
NASA interview. “More important, [it] allows us the capability of being more self sufficient and not requiring as many supplies to be sent up to the space station. Going on to the moon and to Mars, that’s really going to be critical.”

Astronauts plan to install the system after Endeavour docks at the orbiting laboratory on Monday. The machine will use a distillation process that compensates for the absence of gravity to remove impurities from urine. Then the water will be combined with fluid from showers, shaving, tooth brushing and hand washing, as well as perspiration and water vapor that collects inside the astronauts’ space suits.

All this reclaimed water will go through a processing system to extract free gas and solid materials such as hair and lint. Afterward, the system will remove any remaining contaminants through a high-temperature chemical reaction.

The recycling machine should cut down the amount of water and consumables that must be launched to the station by about 15,000 pounds, or
6,800 kilograms, a year. And since it currently costs roughly $10,000 to ship a pint of fresh water to space, the money savings will be huge. Moreover, the system is part of a plan to expand the number of residents the space station can accommodate from three to six.

“As early as the late 1960s we knew sustaining life in space would require recycling water and oxygen,” Bob Bagdigian, the project manager for the overall Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support
System on the station, said in a release. “A number of us have experienced the entire life cycle of this technology, all the way from early ideas to implementation. Knowing that we will soon see this system completed gives us great pride.”

BOCA RATON, FL — The Coca-Cola Company today announced a partnership that will license the beverage giant’s plant-based packaging to Heinz for use in its ketchup packaging.

The bottle technology, which Coke launched in 2009, uses a plastic sourced from sugarcane waste to replace 30 percent of the plastic in beverage bottles. The company’s goal is to eventually achieve 100 percent renewable sources for its packaging, and licensing the technology to Heinz will no doubt help fund the research process.

Heinz plans to introduce PlantBottled ketchup this summer across the United States, switching out about 120 million of its 20-ounce retail and foodservice bottles with the partly renewable packaging. The PlantBottles will have a special label and environmental messages to communicate the benefits of the plant-based packaging to shoppers.

During a press conference this morning at the CAGNY annual conference in Boca Raton, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent and Heinz CEO William Johnson spelled out the details and the benefits of the partnership.

“This partnership represents a significant landmark,” in Coke’s journey to achieve its environmental goals, including water neutrality and carbon neutrality, Kent said. Furthermore, it is “the future of the world, we at the Coca-Cola Company believe, lies in the golden triangle of partnerships between business and industry, between business and government, and between civil society.”

Coke has already planned to invest more than $150 million in the PlantBottle technology, with a goal of reaching 100 percent renewable and recyclable packaging as soon as the technology allows. Although both CEOs declined to share financial details of the licensing agreement, adding a no-doubt-significant investment from Heinz into PlantBottle technology will also help Coke further its research into renewable packaging.

Kent also said that Coke expects to double its use of PlantBottle packages as the company expands beyond the current nine countries where they sell the products, as well as expand the number of brands that use PlantBottle packaging.

Heinz CEO Johnson said the partnership is a strategic initiative from Heinz as well. “Switching to PlantBotle is another step in our global sustainability initiative to reduce [emissions, waste, energy and water] impacts by 20 percent by 2015.” Heinz said the company is on its way to achieve those goals, which were announced two years ago.

Kent cited a study conducted recently at the Imperial College in London that found Coke’s use of PlantBottle technology can cut the company’s carbon footprint by 12 and 19 percent. And as plastic recycling rates increase, the carbon impacts of the bottles continue to decline. Kent said that PlantBottles used in Denmark are made of 50 percent recycled plastic as well as 30 percent PlantBottle.

Although the PlantBottle technology currently costs slightly more to produce than traditional plastic — costs that both CEOs repeatedly said were not passed on to shoppers — investing in renewably sourced and recyclable packaging provides both more future cost stability and helps achieve sustainability goals.

“Over time, depending where the price of nonrenewable fuels go,” Johnson said, “this could be a long-term cost savings because of stability. Long-term, we see this as cost benefit.”

Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2011/02/23/heinz-and-coke-team-squeeze-ketchup-plantbottles#ixzz1ErI3bz7x