Soft drinks giant Coca-Cola is testing a new full-sleeve plastic label on its single-serve orb-shaped bottle available during the Christmas holiday season at Wal-Mart stores.
The new full-sleeve label is made from a polyolefin mix which allows it to rise in a float tank and separate from PET settled at the bottom.
The label can also create an optical illusion of colored resin for the optical sorting equipment, as well as can mix with and contaminate clear PET grind settled at the bottom of separation tanks.
Moreover, the label can mix in with PET from lightweight water bottles owing to its similar attributes when recyclers use an elutriation process that uses air for sortation.
Coke's manager of sustainable packaging Jeff Meyers comments, "There's a bunch of real world testing that's been done to advance and actually commercialise a new label from Coca-Cola. The story here is we believe we are the first to market with an Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers-compatible (APR) label per their guidelines."
Meyer adds that the company has till date tested multiple bottles in real-world conditions by attaching the new mixed polyolefin labels and pushing product through the supply chain.
