Coca-Cola carries out tests to manufacture bottle caps from CO2 emissions

Much of its current plastic packaging is manufactured at low cost, from fossil fuels. But Coca-Cola's goal is to “capture” CO2 from the air, or from factory emissions, to produce a key ingredient in plastics..

“The plastic we manufacture today releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the environment,” said the project's main investigator, professor Enrico Andreoli. “Our starting material is carbon dioxide,” he revealed, “so we completely defossilize the process and make the plastic free of fossil fuels and fossil carbon.”

Fossil fuel-free plastic

The material is generated in a small black electrode, where an electrical charge passes through a mixture of CO2 and water, producing ethylene, a key ingredient in the flexible type of plastic used in bottle caps.

Coca-Cola's goal is to use “captured” CO2 as a resource, taking it from the air near its factories or directly from its own smokestacks.

Currently, the ethylene it is produced as a cheap by-product of refining petrochemical products, with fossil fuels heated to more than 800°C, “breaking down” the molecules needed to produce plastic.

Reducing the carbon footprint

Coca-Cola's production process generated more than 260 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2020 – or nearly 1% of the world's total CO2 emissions – according to the climate monitoring group Global Carbon Project.

According to the company, the promeThis goal of a 30% reduction in its carbon footprint by 2030 will mainly come from using more recycled plastics.

What is the carbon footprint?

A carbon footprint is a measure of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by an individual, organization, event or product. It is a way of quantifying the environmental impact caused by human activities and can include emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), among other gases. The carbon footprint is measured in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) and is an important tool for evaluating the effectiveness of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 👣

In a similar innovative project, Coca-Cola is funding research in California to turn CO2 into artificial sugar.

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