Sustainability, Clean Energy, Recycling & ESG

There are many noteworthy items in our daily report today, but we focus on two.

A couple of things worth calling out today. First, while we discuss some of the Coke ambitions in the ESG and Climate report published earlier today, we note one important concession from Coke that we believe will need to become mainstream to give consumer products companies any chance of meeting recycling goals, and that is product standardization. The decision to get rid of the Green Sprite bottle is consistent with one of the trends we have been looking for – the green color is a contaminant in any attempt to recycle a clear stream of PET and by taking out the color, Coke will increase the pool of recyclable materials fit for clear bottle use. This needs to be a much more widespread activity and is about more than just beverage bottles. Consumer products companies need to be thinking along the same lines to increase volumes of color-free polyethylene and polypropylene available for recycling – this is likely bad news for the compounders, especially those with large packaging exposure.