Coca Cola Europe recently announced its investment in cure technology recycling start-up to build an innovative pilot plant to regenerate waste plastic bottles into high-quality food and beverage packaging through a single process.

Coca Cola, through its European partner's venture capital fund CCEP ventures, announced that the investment is aimed at supporting cure technology's technology development and commercialization, and plans to establish a pilot recycling plant for plastic bottles in Western Europe.

End to end recycling process for infinite recycling

Cure technology, based in the Netherlands, aims to apply its end-to-end "partial depolymerization" recycling process to opaque and difficult to recycle food grade PET plastics, and claims that its recycling process has lower energy consumption and carbon footprint than other pet recycling processes.

Let's take a look at the process flow of cure technology

One

The first step

Collect all kinds of polyester waste, including colored and contaminated waste, such as polyester packaging, plastic bottles, food trays, carpets and strapping.

Two

Step two

The waste is sorted, cleaned and ready for use.

Three

Step three

The cure technology polyester regeneration process is used to recycle all post consumer polyester with low energy consumption. Cure also allows the modular addition of other technologies, so that it can flexibly select the appropriate scheme according to the type of polyester waste, which is a new differentiation method.

Four

Step 4

By removing the color of the plastic and converting it into transparent particles with the same properties as the primary polyester, cure technology can be used to recycle any polyester material.

Five

Step five

All kinds of polyester can be recycled infinitely, such as: new seat belt → waste seat belt → cure recycling process → new T-shirt → waste T-shirt → cure recycling process → new plastic bottle → waste plastic bottle → cure recycling process → new carpet → old carpet → cure recycling process → new seat belt → waste seat belt → cure recycling process → new plastic bottle → waste plastic bottle

Coca Cola will use cure process to obtain food grade RPET

Once the technology is commercialized, Coca Cola's European partners (CCEP) will mainly obtain recycled food grade plastics from pilot plants to achieve the soft drink brand goal of eliminating petroleum based nascent pet plastics in the next decade.

"With this investment, we are more likely to get enough RPET volume, which will help us accelerate our goal of replacing PET bottles with 100% recycled PET," said Joe Franses, vice president of sustainable development for Coca Cola's European partners

About 4.3 million tons of food grade PET plastics are produced each year in the European Union, according to eunomia, a consultancy, and less than a third, or 1.4 million tons, of which is mechanically recycled. Coca Cola's European partners estimate that by 2030, just replacing bottles of Coca Cola and other beverage brands with recycled PET plastic will eliminate 200000 tons of primary plastic packaging per year.

Cure technology is led by a team of Dutch recycling experts, including morsinkhof group, dufor, cumapol group, DSM niaga and NHL stenden University of Applied Sciences, which are also involved as strategic partners.

This can be used as a "recycled" part of the company's "recycled" parts, thus effectively breaking down the plastic parts. In the long run, the technology is to upgrade all polyester waste streams, including end-to-end recycling of carpets and textiles.

The cure recycling process aims at wireless recycling of various types of polyester materials.

Josse Kunst, chief business officer of cure technology, said polyester is "one of the most reversible plastics in the world and should not be wasted.". "In the factory trial phase of cure process, we received funding subsidies from the European Union and the northern Dutch government," he explained. Now with Coca Cola's funding, it will further help us to promote end-to-end polyester conversion technology.

In addition to investing in recycling plants to increase the use of recycled ingredients, Coca Cola also strengthens the collection, recycling and refilling of plastic bottles to achieve closed-loop of plastic bottles in various ways.