Coke and pepsi duke it out over water bottles

Coke and Pepsi are at it again. Like siblings vying for Mom's attention, they want buyers to know how green they are. Both companies plan to bottle their respective beverages in wholly plant-based bottles instead of plastic or partial plastic. Great! When? Nobody knows.

The other issue is what plant materials to use, how to source them, and how cost effective the whole process may--or may not--be. See the excerpt below that The New York Times posted yesterday.

The Race to Greener Bottles Could Be Long
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: December 15, 2011

The beverage rivals are racing to become the first to produce a plastic soda bottle made entirely from plants.

But despite dueling announcements claiming technological breakthroughs, consumers should not expect to see many all-plant bottles on store shelves any time soon. Neither company is confident enough in the technology to say when, or even if, they will be able to deliver on their environmental ambitions.

Coke delivered the latest volley on Thursday, saying it plans to work with three companies that are developing competing technologies to make plastic from plants, with bottles rolling out to consumers in perhaps a few years.

PepsiCo is aiming to beat that timeline and claim the 100 percent green label first. The company declared in March that it had cracked the code of the all-plant plastic bottle, and on Thursday, it said that it was on schedule to conduct a test next year that involved producing 200,000 bottles made from plant-only plastic.

But until Pepsi conducts the test, executives said they would not be able to predict when large-scale production of such bottles might begin. If the test fails to prove that the technologies favored by Pepsi are cost-effective at a commercial scale, more experimentation will be needed, said Denise H. Lefebvre, the company’s vice president for global beverage packaging.

“The test is very important in really determining efficient cost and manufacturing processes,” Ms. Lefebvre said. She said the company was still working out details of the test, including what products to sell in the all-plant bottles and what type of plant materials to use to produce them.

Coke was the first out of the gate in the green bottle race, when in 2009 it began selling Dasani water in the United States in bottles made with up to 30 percent plant-based plastics. (In some cases, recycled plastic may decrease the plant-based amount.)

To read more, click here.

Image courtesy of Neatorama.com.

Comments

[Rob Feckler]

That's a nice boxing show you got there my friend, LOL. There is an old ad by Pepsi where a kid goes to a vending machine to buy two cans of Coke to step on, just so he could reach the Pepsi button. I believe that's still in Youtube.

[plumbing]

I wonder if it could have been infinitely more rewarding for firms to collaborate with some of their clients and competitors in a more candid and transparent way to find mutually agreeable solutions.