Coca-Cola Rolled Out All-New Bottles — Here's What's Changing

Few products are more closely associated with their packaging than Coca-Cola. The Coke bottle has a long history, and every detail, from the label font to those signature curves, has become deeply ingrained in the soda's identity. Now, that iconic bottle is getting a major makeover, except, you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at it. The classic design isn't going anywhere, but beginning this week, every 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola sold at American retailers will be made from 100% recycled plastic.

The move applies to all versions of Coca-Cola, including Diet Coke and Coke Zero Sugar. All versions of Coke sold in 12-ounce bottles have already been converted to 100% recycled packaging, as have all one-liter bottles of the company's Dasani water subsidiary.

These changes are all part of a broader initiative by the Coca-Cola Company to switch all of its packaging to recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate). PET is the most commonly-used type of plastic resin. It is manufactured from fossil fuels, but it is also extremely easy and efficient to recycle. Coca-Cola first began using recycled PET, or rPET, in 2021, and has scaled up its use of recycled materials dramatically since then. Coca-Cola even stopped making Sprite in green bottles as part of the effort. These moves are a long time coming, after the company has faced substantial criticism for its plastic waste output.

Coca-Cola has long been one of the top contributors to plastic waste. The environmental protection initiative Break Free from Plastic has ranked Coke as the world's worst plastic polluter for six consecutive years, and The Guardian reports that the company produces more than a fifth of the world's PET plastic bottles. PET is a problem on two fronts — manufacturing produces significant amounts of greenhouse gasses while consuming scarce fossil fuel supplies, and if it isn't recycled, it often ends up in oceans and waterways, devastating wildlife populations.

In 2018, Coca-Cola launched the World Without Waste program to address these criticisms. The initiative has three core objectives: to make 100% of Coca-Cola's packaging recyclable by the year 2025, to use 50% recycled material in all new packaging by 2030, and to have 25% of their beverages sold in refillable packaging by 2030. But even though Coke is promoting its new packaging as being made from 100% recycled plastic, it's worth noting that the bottle caps and labels still aren't recyclable, since they are not made from rPET. While Coca-Cola's new switch to all-rPET packaging on its 12 and 20-ounce bottles is a strong step towards the initiative's second objective, there is still a lot of work to be done.