Coca-Cola Europacific Partners further invests in PET recycling start-up

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) is accelerating its ambition to eliminate virgin oil-based plastic from its bottles through an investment in scaling technology that offers a new lease of life for hard-to-recycle plastic polyester waste, and creates high quality rPET for food and drink packaging.

Through its innovation investment engine, CCEP Ventures, CCEP is making a further investment in recycling start-up CuRe Technology, which uses ‘polyester rejuvenation’ to target plastics that cannot be recycled by mechanical recycling methods and prevents them from being incinerated, downcycled or sent to landfill.

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners makes further investment in recycling technology to accelerate the elimination of virgin plastic in its bottles.

CuRe Technology’s recycling process creates high-quality rPET with a carbon footprint that is approximately 65% lower than virgin PET, (based on CuRe’s life cycle assessment, carbon footprint reductions compared to virgin: 2022 figure) which can be used for food and drink packaging and re-processed as many times as necessary. This will offer a new lease of life for hard-to-recycle plastics, accelerating the transition to a circular economy for PET and creating a new stream of rPET.

CCEP will have access to CuRe Technology’s rPET for use in its bottles in Europe, which will be supplied by a new plant set to start production in 2025.

This is CCEP’s second investment in CuRe Technology, following initial funding in 2020 to support CuRe Technology’s R&D roadmap and pilot plant. This phase will build on success to-date and take the technology to commercial readiness.