Lo and behold, as Saabira Chaudhuri notes in the Wall Street Journal, a miraculous new process might come to the rescue and make bottles fully recyclable and circular, a Holy Grail rather than a plain old bottle.
For the bottled-water industry, the challenge has been to find a recycled product that meets regulatory standards for food-grade PET plastic, which is used in bottles.
Now Evian, the French bottled water owned by Danone, is trying to use a process from a Montreal company, Loop Industries, which apparently has "a revolutionary technology poised to transform the plastics industry.
The monomers are then repolymerized to create virgin-quality polyester plastic that meets FDA requirements for use in food-grade packaging."
If this actually works, if Loop actually has a process that can actually separate PET bottles back into their building blocks, then it certainly is a wonderful thing, a step in the direction of a truly circular economy where plastic bottles are actually turned into plastic bottles.
Loop has also signed deals with Pepsi, who says "Loop’s technology enables PepsiCo to be a leading force in ensuring plastic packaging need never become waste" – making real that dream of turning waste into what they can call a resource.
“It’s the total broadened awareness of the environment, especially with millennials.” Or is it all just talk to assuage our guilt?
They want to be seen to be doing the right thing, so the public will all say that this is fine, some day the bottles will be fully recycled, and so the cities being buried in plastic will leave them alone.
It also doesn’t change the fact that it is still using a lot of energy and effort to move around plastic and water when most of us can get perfectly good water out of a tap.
Even in a fully recycled bottle it makes no sense.