Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be used to make Coca-Cola bottle tops, Coca-Cola has announced. To achieve its goal of being net zero by 2040, the company is sponsoring a three-year trial at Swansea University. At present, much of the firm’s packaging is made cheaply from fossil fuels. However, it aims to “capture” CO2 from the environment or from industrial outputs to produce a major plastic ingredient. This approach would de-fossilise the process of making plastic, making it free from fossil fuels and carbon.
“The plastic we make today releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the environment,” said Professor Enrico Andreoli, who is leading the project. Ethylene, a key ingredient in the flexible plastic that is used for bottle tops, is created when an electrical charge is passed through a mixture of water and CO2 in a small black electrode. Andreoli describes the creation of ethylene as the “magic” part of the process. He is confident the technology will work, and success would be evidence that the process could be scaled up.
Coca-Cola hopes to use captured carbon dioxide as a resource, taking it from the areas near its factories as well as its own smokestacks. Currently, ethylene is obtained as a by-product of petrochemical refining, with fossil fuels heated to a temperature exceeding 800C to enable the required molecules to be extracted. This method resulted in over 260 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2020, accounting for nearly 1% of the world’s total carbon footprint.
Director of Coca-Cola’s venturing division for Europe and the Pacific, Craig Twyford, said that the business’s assurance to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% by 2030 would chiefly be from more recycled plastics. From 2030 until 2040, the firm will most likely take more revolutionary measures to achieve net zero. Twyford remarked that in addition to potentially employing carbonated drinks, there are opportunities to use CO2 to develop some of the company’s packaging. In a similar scheme, Coca-Cola is funding research in California to turn CO2 into an artificial sweetener
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