When you finish a bottle of your favorite PepsiCo beverage, what happens next? Ideally, that bottle gets recycled to be used again.<\/p>\n
That idea sits at the heart of packaging circularity: keeping used packaging materials in use by turning them into new packaging again and again. While recycling can sound simple, the reality is more complex. Some plastic products, such as most beverage bottles, move easily through today\u2019s recycling systems depending on where you live and what your city\u2019s infrastructure can handle. Other plastics, despite being used as part of everyday life, are not easily recycled and too often end up as waste in landfills.<\/p>\n
But what if some of those other plastics \u2014 like old clothing, carpet fibers, harder-to-recycle plastic bottles, jars or films \u2014 which most often can\u2019t be recycled by traditional means, could be given new life? What if they could be prevented from ending up as plastic waste by being turned into high-quality, food grade, recycled beverage bottles? It has the potential to be a gamechanger for the future of packaging circularity.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what PepsiCo is aiming to do through a multi-year agreement with Eastman, purchasing materials produced by their novel advanced recycling technology which repurposes discarded hard-to-recycle polyester plastic waste, reducing reliance on virgin plastic and delivering more of our products in recycled packaging.<\/p>\n
The results are starting to show up in real life. In 2026, PepsiCo began rolling out Gatorade bottles in the U.S. made with recycled plastic enabled by Eastman\u2019s technology, demonstrating how materials once headed for waste streams can be turned into high\u2011quality, specially designed beverage packaging.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s exciting because with this technology, plastics that otherwise couldn\u2019t be recycled are being recycled, which allows for more recycled content to be incorporated into packaging that have historically required virgin quality materials to create,\u201d said Burgess Davis, PepsiCo\u2019s North America chief sustainability officer.<\/p>\n
What is advanced recycling?<\/p>\n
Traditional, or \u201cmechanical,\u201d recycling works well for many clear plastic bottles. It\u2019s when used plastic is sorted, cleaned, melted, and reshaped into new packaging. This is the process most local municipalities use to recycle the bottles you toss in your blue bins at home that get collected curbside each week. Continuing efforts to improve and invest in these systems is a key element of PepsiCo\u2019s sustainable packaging strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you finish a bottle of your favorite PepsiCo beverage, what happens next? Ideally, that bottle gets recycled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":{"0":"post-373412","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}