Beverage giant Coca-Cola has entered into a loan agreement with Netherlands-based Ioniqa Technologies to advance the development of its recycling technology for PET.
Image: Coca-Cola to support Ioniqa to accelerate the development of its recycling technology for PET. Photo: courtesy of bplanet / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Coca-Cola’s new deal will help extend a loan to Ioniqa to support the development of its advanced technology to manufacture high-grade and recycled PET content from hard-to-recycle PET waste.
Ioniqa CEO Tonnis Hooghoudt said: “Partnering with The Coca-Cola Company is a further validation of our journey to launch this unique process for transforming hard-to-recycle PET waste into high-quality, foodgrade material.
“The launch of our plant next year will be a step change in the transformation of hard-to-recycle PET plastic into a more widely usable recycled material, supporting the vision of Coca-Cola.”
The deal will allow to enhance the development and deployment of high-grade recycled content PET for use in bottles of Coca-Cola.
The investment will help Coca-Cola to support its world without waste initiative, which is designed to develop packaging with around 50% recycled material by 2030.
Ioniqa’s new technology is said to support the circular economy for plastics through recycling packages such as colored PET bottles into food-grade quality packaging. The colored PET bottles are generally excluded from certain recycling streams.
Ioniqa has developed an advanced recycling technology, which can convert hard-to-recycle PET-containing waste such as colored bottles into purified polymer building blocks that can be transformed into quality PET.
According to Ioniqa, the technology has been verified at the demonstration scale with value chain partners.
The company is currently involved in the construction of a 10 kMT industrial plant in Netherlands, which is expected to be commissioned in 2019.
The Coca-Cola chief innovation officer Robert Long said: “Our investment in new and pioneering recycling technologies is an opportunity for significant movement toward closing the loop and creating a circular economy for PET.
“We plan to continue investment in developing the right partnerships and initiatives – like with Ioniqa – to support our vision of a World Without Waste.”
Ioniqa, which is a clean-tech spinoff from the Eindhoven University of Technology, is specialized in transforming all types and colors of PET waste into valuable sources for ‘virgin-quality’ recycled PET.