SPARTANBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA (September 25, 2007) -- The food-grade PET recycling plant that Coca-Cola Co. is building in Spartanburg with United Resource Recovery Corp. is just the first of several that the beverage company intends to build in the United States.

In addition, Coca-Cola Recycling LLC will add 35 recycling collection centers by the end of 2008, placing them at or within existing facilities. The project is the result of Coca-Cola Co.’s strategy to capture and reuse or sell all the materials generated by its manufacturing and bottling operations.

The centers will range in size from 300 to 6,500 square meters and have balers, compactors and handling equipment. They will not be used to collect recyclable materials from sources outside Coke’s own operations at least initially.

“We are going to be inwardly focused and going after the material we generate in-house,” said John Burgess, president and chief executive officer of Coca-Cola Recycling (CCR).

CCR is part of Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., which sells about 80 percent of the Coca-Cola Co.’s bottle and can volume in North America.

Coca-Cola’s plans to build more than just one food-grade PET recycling plant were not announced at its news conference earlier this month in Washington, when the company announced a $60 million (450.9 million yuan) recycling initiative.

But in a phone interview September 13, Scott Vitters, director of sustainable packaging at Coca-Cola Co., said the $45 million (338.2 million yuan), 45,360-metric-ton Spartanburg plant that will start operations in September 2008 “is just the beginning of the journey” as the company works toward its goal of recycling or reusing 100 percent of the PET it uses in packaging.

“It is the first of a number of plants” that Coca-Cola will have for PET recycling, Vitters said. “A bottle-to-bottle strategy is front-and-center for us.”

Plastics recyclers are concerned that Coca-Cola’s moves will drive up prices for baled PET. They are also apprehensive because the largest thrust of Coca-Cola’s recycling initiative is focused on internal collection efforts, rather than boosting the PET recycling rate, which has fallen to 23 percent from almost 39 percent in 1994.

“Without an increase in collection of post-consumer PET, increased recycling by [Coke] would exacerbate an already under-supplied recycled PET industry,” said Dennis Sabourin, executive director of the National Association for PET Container Resources in Sonoma, Calif.

But Vitters stressed that Coke is working in a variety of ways to boost the amount of PET recycled by consumers. He pointed to:

    * The company’s $2 million (15 million yuan) investment to help the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based RecycleBank program -- which has expanded household recycling in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania -- grow nationwide.

    * A pilot program with Delta Airlines that began in June to collect all aluminum, plastic and paper products on domestic flights into Atlanta, Georgia. Both Coke and Delta hope to expand the program to other Delta hubs.

    * Event recycling at the University of Georgia football games and at other venues such as the four-day Bonaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, where 8 metric tons of PET was collected.

    * Its sponsorship of RecycleMania, a program each spring that this year collected 18,300 metric tons of recyclables over two months at 201 colleges.

“We have been very active in away-from-home recycling,” Vitters said. “We want to work with existing community recyclers” and partner with existing groups. But he added that at this point, Coke’s emphasis is on capturing materials within its own manufacturing and bottling network.

“We want to better leverage the materials we control today and start to consolidate that material,” Vitters said. “We knew that we needed to expand collection” if the company was going to sustain long-term a level of 10 percent recycled content in its PET bottles -- a goal it met in 2004 and 2005, before sliding back to less than 5 percent in 2006.

Vitters said Coke’s investment in the Spartanburg plant -- in part an equity stake and in part a loan to United Resource Recovery -- “is the right decision for us. We need to make sure we have a home for the materials we collect.”

The company has similar investments in PET recycling plants globally: a 13,600-metric-ton-per-year plant in France, a 22,700-metric-ton-per-year plant in Mexico, a 13,600-metric-ton-per-year plant in Austria and a 9,000-metric-ton-per-year plant in the Philippines that is expected to begin operations in the fourth quarter.

Vitters said the main intent of the collection centers at CCR is “to get material the company uses back into our system.” But he said Coca-Cola was “not opposed” to selling to others materials it collects that exceed its needs or that it doesn’t use in its manufacturing operations.

Burgess said CCR will sell other materials that its operations collect, including high and low density polyethylene, shrink film, stretch film, strapping from bales, polypropylene closures, old corrugated cartons and paper waste from offices.

Burgess said the centers would be patterned at a year-old pilot center in Eagan, Minnesota, that collected 113 metric tons of material in its first year. He said volume and efficiency has improved more than 20 percent in that time.

He said the next collection center will be in Indianapolis, and that CCR was looking at locations in Florida and Texas after that. The company’s goal is to have nine open by the end of the year.

“The long-term key to recovery of materials is to make it part of the daily routine, so you do it as you go and don’t let the material pile up,” said Burgess. “You have to change the mind-set of workers so recycling is imbedded in the culture.”

He added: “Our long-term goal is to eventually capture 100 percent of the material used in our system and get all operations aligned around a common practice and in a common system.”

In late 2008, he said the company will put together some pilot programs to evaluate how to collect materials in the communities where the collection centers are located. The first focus will likely be existing customers and suppliers, and possibly other manufacturers.

“We have scaled this to have an upside,” Burgess said. “We think the opportunities are very good” to expand collection beyond the initial internal focus.