Bill Nye has a lesson to share about recycling and PET bottles.
Nye, best known as the host of TV's Bill Nye the Science Guy and Bill Nye Saves the World, is now presenting information on bottle recycling in a video from Coca-Cola Co. presented by stop-motion animators Mackinnon & Saunders, who worked on the feature film Fantastic Mr. Fox. (Nye appears as a stop-motion animated character created out of recycled plastics — complete with Coca-Cola flexible packaging standing in for his trademark bowtie — in the two-minute spot.)
While Nye's narration mentions "our good friends" at Coke, the video focuses on explaining what happens during the traditional mechanical recycling process, rather than promoting a specific drink. It includes how steel and aluminum are separated from plastics in a material recovery facility, including mentioning MRFs specifically, and goes on to discus how MRFs create bales of recovered plastics, the process of turning bottles into PET flake and even a discussion on how to make bottles, with an explanation of preforms.
"There are a lot of reports out there. There are a lot of acronyms. There's a lot of complicated and sometimes mind-numbing stuff," Christine Yeager, director of sustainability at Coca-Cola North America, told the website The Drum. "One of our biggest hurdles [was] changing the narrative about recycling to something that was simple and can be digested, understood and relatable."