Coca-Cola Co. continues to play with different technologies to use recycled PET in soda bottles, but the company has been careful not to talk too much about its efforts.
Most recently, Coke received a U.S. patent for a multilayer bottle with a center layer of recycled PET.
The cola giant long has been rumored to be interested in using recycled PET in the United States, as it does in some markets overseas. But executives still have a bad taste in their mouths from the last time the company committed to using recycled PET.
Coke made a tremendous public relations splash in 1990 when it announced plans to use containers that incorporated repolymerized resin. But the company quietly dropped those plans when consumer and legislative pressure diminished.
Expectations among recycling advocates still are high, and the new patent will fuel speculation that Coke will — or should — do more to build a post-consumer market for all the bottles it generates.