Plastic by Any Other Name
Coke and Pepsi's plant-based bottles still damage the environment.
By Amy Westervelt, Slate.com

First came the press releases: In March, PepsiCo touted the "World's First 100 Percent Plant-Based, Renewably Sourced PET Bottle," prompting CocaCola to stammer, "Odwalla First to Market with up to 100 Percent PlantBottle™ Packaging." The subsequent headlines bumped the hype up a notch: "Pepsi bottles: no more plastic" (Christian Science Monitor), "Pepsi Ups Ante on Plant-Based Bottles with 100% Non-Plastic Bottle" (GreenBiz), "Coca Cola—designing bottles from recycled plastic and plant by-product" (Guardian). Last month, Coca-Cola released a commercial for its Dasani-brand bottled water arguing that its partly plant-based packaging is "designed to make a difference": But despite all the buzz, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo's plant-based bottles are still very much plastic.

The companies have merely replaced the fossil fuels (petroleum and natural gas) traditionally used to make their plastic bottles with ethanol from renewable sources (plant waste in Pepsi's case and Brazilian sugar cane in Coke's). Though these initial inputs come from renewable, lower-carbon sources, the resulting plastics are chemically identical to the polyethylene terepthalate, or PET, and high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, that regular plastic bottles are made of—a fact the companies acknowledge. And once the inputs become plastic, they carry all the same environmental impacts as plastic made from fossil fuels: They don't biodegrade, they pollute the world's oceans and soils, and still leach potentially harmful chemicals into our food.

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