The Truth About Pepsi’s New Plant-Based PET Plastic Bottle
Pepsi’s new soda bottle is different.
Last month, PepsiCo made a big announcement: it had developed the world’s first entirely plant-based PET beverage bottle. And although the new bottle is made from plants, it’s actually less like those corn-based compostable bottles you may have heard about and more like regular, ordinary PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic, the kind of plastic nearly all single-use beverage bottles are made from.
I’ll explain all about the new bottle, why it’s interesting, and what I see are its pros and cons. But first, I need to tell you about how I went a little nutty on Twitter the night after the story was published. See, normally I’d have taken the story in stride, looked into the bottle on my own time, and decided if it was worth writing about. But that night, I started seeing all these excited tweets about PepsiCo’s new “plastic-free” bottle.
Plastic-free? I thought. No way. Just because the bottle’s made from plants doesn’t mean it’s plastic-free. What were these people talking about? My intrepid truth-seeking self kicked into action.
Turns out there were a couple of media outlets that had gotten the story wrong. The Christian Science Monitor screamed, “Pepsi Bottles: No More Plastic,” while Green Biz announced, “Pepsi Ups Ante on Plant-Based Bottles with 100% Non-Plastic Bottle.”