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The company is also beginning to employ reusable cups with microchips at its Freestyle soda machines at universities and theme parks, and beginning to pilot more refillable and returnable bottle programs in the U.S. Coca-Cola is working with Loop to test reusable cups for soda machines at Burger King in France, it’s working with a grocery chain and Loop to sell drinks in refillable bottles. Refillable packaging is slowly catching on in the U.S., including through projects like Terracycle’s Loop, which is now selling mainstream products in reusable packaging at some Kroger stores. “This makes it difficult for consumers who want their deposit to return bottles to where they purchased them.” (In Brazil, Coca-Cola offers customers a digital wallet system that tracks bottle purchases so that they can be returned to different stores to try to make the process more convenient.) “They don’t want the hassle,” says Conrad MacKerron, senior vice president at As You Sow, a nonprofit that had filed a shareholder proposal asking Coca-Cola to set stronger goals for reusables. In the U.S., there are likely to be challenges from grocery stores that don’t want to devote space or time to managing old bottles. But it’s easiest for companies to start in places where refillable packaging is already widespread, like Latin America, or Germany, where the law requires that a certain percentage of bottles get reused. The basic system of refillable packaging isn’t complex, though companies do have to invest in the infrastructure to clean and repackage bottles and track them in reverse logistics. “The main thing is not to pollute the oceans,” he says. But Littlejohn says that refillable plastic bottles are still a viable option since they can also steeply reduce waste. Reusable plastic bottles still have challenges, especially if they’re made from fossil fuels rather than recycled plastic. Glass bottles are reused an average of 50 times in refill systems and then melted down and remade into new glass bottles. Reusable glass bottles used to be the standard for soda packaging, and Oceana believes that they’re still the best option now. Even glass bottles, which use more energy than plastic to produce and transport, can have a lower carbon footprint than single-use plastic bottles when the glass bottles are repeatedly reused. While bottle deposit fees and other policy changes could help improve recycling rates, reusable bottles have a second advantage of using far less material, shrinking the environmental footprint of the packaging. “They’re actually assets on their books.” In Brazil, around 90% of Coke’s refillable bottles are taken back to the store the company wants the bottles back, so it does everything it can to get customers to comply. “In a reusable system like Coke has, they own bottles as inventory,” Littlejohn says. In the U.S., less than a third of plastic drink bottles get recycled. Recycling alone can’t solve the problem of plastic waste. “Reusables are a very leveraged way to reduce plastic pollution on the ocean,” says Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Oceana. If the percentage of refillable bottles grew just 10% in coastal countries, it would reduce ocean plastic pollution from PET bottles by 22%, the nonprofit found.
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Oceana, an environmental nonprofit, calculated that as many as 34 billion plastic bottles may reach the ocean each year. What would it take to return to a system that dramatically shrinks waste?Ĭoca-Cola’s “universal bottle” Even a small shift to refillable packaging can have an outsize impact. (Coca-Cola told Fast Company that it wants to allow flexibility in how local markets contribute to the global goal.) But before single-use plastic bottles became ubiquitous, refillable soda bottles were the norm. It hasn’t yet shared the details about where it plans to focus its efforts as of now, while refillable glass or plastic bottles are commonly used in some countries, they represent a tiny fraction of sales in a place like the U.S. Coca-Cola recently announced that by the end of the decade, it will sell a quarter of its drinks in refillable packaging.