Generally speaking, wine and beer come in green and brown bottles. The tinted glass prevents UV rays from oxidizing the wine and skunking up the beer.
Image credit: Oscar Nord on Unsplash
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
However, there’s no reason beyond brand identity to put Sprite in green-tinted plastic bottles.
And it turns out that tinted PET actually screws up recycling streams.
Image credit: Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Colorless PET is what purchasers of recycled plastic want, whereas no one has any use for the tinted stuff.
Good stuff in the middle (Image credit: Michal Manas)
As a result, recyclers have to add an expensive additional sorting step to divide different colors of PET, to avoid contaminating the clear PET bales of recycled material; and they get no return on their investment for baling up the blue and green stuff, because no one wants it.
No one wants us (Image credit: Matthewdikmans)
That’s why Japanese beverage makers phased out colored PET, way back in 2001. When neighboring South Korea followed suit, they found they doubled their recycling rate to 70%, according to Plastics News.
Here in 2021, Coca-Cola is finally catching up, and phasing out green PET for the Sprite brand. They’ve also announced that they’re transitioning to 100% recycled PET across all brands. Better late than never.
Source: core77