Coca-Cola is bringing '100%' recycled plastic bottles to Canada. What does that mean?

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This week:

• Coca-Cola is bringing '100%' recycled plastic bottles to Canada. What does that mean?
• Why is Greenbelt land so valuable?
• Disposing of a mattress is a symbol of the larger problem of waste management

Coca-Cola is bringing '100%' recycled plastic bottles to Canada. What does that mean?

All 500-millilitre bottles of Coke, Sprite, Fanta and other sparkling beverage brands from Coca-Cola in Canada will be made entirely of recycled plastic — except for the cap and label — by early 2024.

That's expected to save 3,000 tonnes of PET plastic (polyethylene terephthalate, identified with the "resin code" No. 1) and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7,000 tonnes in 2024 alone, Coca-Cola Canada said in a news release announcing the change last week.

A green strip on the new labels reads: "I'm a 100% recycled bottle" — something that at least one environmental consulting company thinks is misleading because of the non-recycled cap and label.

According to Kurt Ritter, vice-president and general manager of sustainability for Coca-Cola in Canada and the U.S., the goal isn't just to cut environmental impacts — it's also to address skepticism about recycling, partly because of reports that plastic collected for recycling often isn't recycled.

"It's a proof point that recycling works," Ritter said.

Last year, Coca-Cola turned to recycled PET for its Dasani water bottles, and has launched recycled bottles for sparkling beverages in select U.S. cities and some countries in Europe. The company's goal is that by 2030, 50 per cent of its packaging will be made with recycled materials, and one bottle or can will be collected for recycling for each one it produces. (Some research has found that aluminum cans are greener than plastic bottles, while other research has found the opposite.)

Coca-Cola's transition to recycled plastic has been gradual, thanks to a shortage of recycled PET available. Recycled plastic drink bottles have been relatively uncommon on the market until now.

The National Association for PET Container Resources, a packaging trade organization that encompasses the U.S., Canada and Mexico, reports that although recyclers collected record numbers of bottles and other PET containers in 2020, the North American recycling rate for PET was just 36.8 per cent that year. 

Beverage makers also face competition for recycled PET from manufacturers who use it to make textiles such as polyester clothing and carpets.

Ritter said Coca-Cola has managed to source enough of the material for the new bottles in Canada and the U.S., and they'll be manufactured in Canada.

The company is also taking steps to increase PET supply through efforts such as switching all its green Sprite bottles to clear plastic (which is more easily recycled) and pushing for bottle deposits in places like Ontario. (For those who don't know, these are fees paid by shoppers when they buy products in recyclable containers; they get the deposit back when empties are returned to a drop-off location for recycling.)

Bottle deposit programs consistently yield the highest return rate for recycling and the cleanest material, said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Circular Innovation Council, a national group trying to create a circular economy that includes plastics. 

Deposit programs for plastic bottles exist in all provinces and territories except Nunavut, Manitoba and Ontario (which has deposits for alcoholic beverages only), although Ontario is considering the idea. This week, Quebec added deposits to more containers, and increased some deposit fees to encourage more people to return them.

St. Godard said Coca-Cola's commitment to recycled plastic bottles will create a demand and higher value for recycled materials, and that's key to making recycling systems work.

However, she added that the company also needs to track and report on whether it fulfilled its promise. "They need to show people they're actually doing it."

Consumers also need to do their part by looking for and buying these bottles, she said. "Rewarding this kind of commitment is important." 

St. Godard emphasized that consumers need to put empty containers in the recycling or return them to ensure they get turned into other bottles.

She also encouraged Canadians to look beyond single-use containers — especially non-recyclable ones — and for opportunities to refill and reuse the products they buy. 

Coca-Cola says it will serve 25 per cent of its products in reusable packaging, including returnable bottles and refillable cups, by 2030.

— Emily Chung

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The Big Picture: The value of Ontario's Greenbelt

For much of the last year, the fate of Ontario's Greenbelt has been a subject of public fascination, largely because the provincial government green-lit plans to allow developers to build an estimated 50,000 homes on ecologically sensitive and protected land. In the face of investigative reporting and public pressure, Premier Doug Ford reversed the decision.

The debate over the development of parts of the Greenbelt is the result of a growing population that needs to be housed. But as CBC reporter Colin Butler shows, that's not necessarily what's driving the rising value of Greenbelt land.

Ryan Parker, a farmland appraiser based in London, Ont., believes it's been driven mostly by farmers themselves. "Farmers have been aggressively expanding, and really, that's what's created a lot of the increase in value on farmland in Ontario," Parkers said.

Read Colin's full story here.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Sewage is warm, which means it's full of energy that can be used to heat buildings. Vancouver and Halifax already have projects to do that, and now one is coming to Toronto.

• The financial and environmental cost of hydrogen depends on how it's made, and colours of the "hydrogen rainbow" are assigned based on that. "White hydrogen," found in natural deposits underground, is one of the newest and cheapest kinds. One of the world's largest white hydrogen deposits has just been discovered in France.

• This week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the controversial announcement that his government was exempting heating oil from the carbon tax for three years. As it turns out, even with the cut, that's still the most expensive way to heat your home, CBC's Kerry Campbell explains.

• Researchers are breeding corn to be shorter so it can better survive windstorms. That could have some additional environmental benefits.

Disposing of a mattress is a symbol of the larger problem of waste management

It's a grey, wet October day at the landfill in Greater Sudbury in northern Ontario, and the hazy conditions have attracted colonies of seagulls and eagles in search of food. 

Standing on top of some 30 years' worth of garbage, landfill manager Aziz Rehman eyes a pile of mattresses waiting to be handled by the trucks that process incoming trash.

"Everybody working in a landfill hates mattresses," said Rehman. 

As the trucks begin to roll over that section in an attempt to pack all the waste together and save space, the mattresses bounce right back. Designed to resist compression, they are a machine operator's worst nightmare. 

To make things worse, the springs in the mattresses often get tangled in the equipment parts and cause serious damage to the machinery. 

There are other complications. Rehman said discarded mattresses hold leachate, a liquid that passes through the waste and contains dangerous contaminants. 

Landfills typically collect leachate to avoid polluting local waterways. But when it gets absorbed into the mattress, it seeps back up to the surface instead of flowing downwards to the treatment systems. That leaves a scar on the landscape. 

When Rehman drives past a section of the landfill that's been covered with a layer of soil and hydroseeded, he can spot where a mattress is likely to be buried just by looking at the vegetation. 

"We're looking at a grassy area, but there's one leachate spot right there," he said, adding it is typically a sign a mattress is buried underneath.

Greater Sudbury has about 163,000 residents, and on average, they send some 12,000 mattresses to the landfill each year. A business case for a mattress recycling program is before Greater Sudbury city councillors. 

"I really hope they'll go for it this time," says the city's director of environmental services, Renee Brownlee. "Last year, it got deferred." 

She feels it's a sound financial proposal. It costs about $30 to recycle a mattress, versus an estimated $68 to bury it. 

Like many of the smaller and more rural cities in Ontario, Greater Sudbury does not have a big enough population to sustain a private mattress recycling facility. It has to ship everything 400 kilometres south, which increases costs. 

All the mattresses in Ontario that are thrown out land in a facility managed by Recyc-Mattress, the only company in the province doing this type of work. 

Company director Eric Castro says it's not a very profitable business. "There's not a lot of money to be pulled out from an old mattress." 

What has enabled the company to stay afloat while others closed down is technological improvements. He says 95 per cent of the material from a mattress can be recycled and used for filler material for industries like carpeting and insulation.

To make the project viable, Castro says, there needs to be a high volume of incoming mattresses, which is why the company set up shop in the Toronto area. 

He says while the cost of recycling mattresses has remained stable over the years, transportation costs have not, which is dissuading potential clients in more rural areas from seeking Recyc-Mattresses's services.

Few Canadian municipalities and provinces have mattress diversion programs, and places that do tend to pass on the cost to residents directly. In Toronto, for example, each house is charged $20.34 a year for all oversized items processing.  

In Barrie, residents pay $15 to recycle a discarded mattress. Some residents of Manitoba, Alberta and Vancouver can expect to pay a similar price. In Prince Edward Island, mattress recycling is paid for by the government in an attempt to save space in the province's lone landfill.

Ontario's approach is rooted in the assumption that producers should be responsible for what happens to a mattress at the end of its life cycle. Ontario's plan is to pass on the recycling cost directly to manufacturers using extended producer responsibility legislation passed in 2016. 

In a statement to CBC News, Gary Wheeler, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, said there are no "currently defined timelines" for when its producer responsibility regulations might apply to mattresses.

Calvin Lakhan, a post-doctoral researcher and co-investigator of the Waste Wiki project at Toronto's York University, says the province is lagging behind on this because it does not consider mattresses to be a high waste-management priority.

"It's not that it's less important," said Lakhan. "It's just that the infrastructure and supporting systems to make a collection system viable are not there."

— Aya Dufour

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