Coca-Cola to trial paper bottles on the European market

Coca-Cola will trial a paper bottle for the first time this spring. The bottle got developed previously in collaboration with The Paper Bottle Company (Paboco).

Prototype

In October last year, Coca-Cola presented the prototype of its paper bottle. The bottle consists of a paper shell with a recyclable plastic inner layer and cap. The ultimate goal is to develop a bottle that can be fully recycled as paper.

The bottle, which Paboco created through a collaboration with Cola-Cola, is suitable for carbonated as well as non-carbonated drinks. In addition, it could also hold beauty products or any other liquids.

Hungary

The drinks giant is now also going to test the bottle in practice on the Hungarian market. Through a partnership with kifli.hu, an online retailer, 2,000 consumers will be able to taste AdeZ, a plant-based drink produced by The Coca-Cola Company, in the new bottle. The trial will take place in the second quarter. 

“This test is an important step to assess how the paper bottle performs in real life and how consumers respond to it,” said Stijn Franssen, R&D Packaging Innovation Manager at Coca-Cola Europe.

Goals

The paper bottle fits into Coca-Cola’s ‘World Without Waste’ ambition. The company wants to collect 100 per cent of its packaging by 2025. Furthermore, the company aims to make all its packaging 100 per cent recyclable (today, this is 97 per cent in Belgium), and all plastic packaging must contain at least 50 per cent of recycled material by 2023.

Founded in 2015, Paboco is a joint venture between Danish packaging specialist BillerudKorsnäs and Austrian bottle maker Alpla. Besides Coca-Cola, several other companies, such as L’Oréal and Carlsberg, have joined the project. The latter also presented its own prototype of a paper bottle in the past.