The end of plastic bottles?

Plant plastic signals change to bottled drinks - 22nd May 2020

Environmentally-friendly drinks bottles manufactured entirely from plant-based plastic could soon hit the shelves.

The ‘Paper Bottle Project’, which aims to develop plastic created from plant sugars instead of fossil fuels, has attracted the attention and support of companies such as Coca Cola, Carlsberg and L’Oréal.

The new bottles are strong enough to contain liquids and they also keep the drinks refreshingly cold. They feature an outer cardboard layer reinforced with a plant-based, plastic inner sleeve. After being separated, both layers are fully recyclable, with it only taking a single year for the plastic itself to have fully decomposed following composting.

Rearranged chemical structures extracted from sustainable plant sugars found in corn, wheat or beets are used to produce the new plant-based plastic material.

The bottles have been designed by a three company consortium made up of Dutch renewable chemicals company Avantium, packing developer BillerudKorsnäs, and bottle manufacturer Alpla. The investing companies are focusing their efforts on reducing plastic pollution and fossil fuel consumption in the hope that doing so will secure the future of their bottled products.

Around 300 million tonnes of plastic, most of which is not recycled, is made using fossil fuels each year. Increased levels of microplastics in our oceans, hugely impacting the global climate crisis, can be directly attributed to mankind's plastic addiction.

With the bottles expected on shelves by 2023, Avantium boss Tom van Aken has issued reassurances that despite the impact of the recent global lockdowns, the project is still on target.