The company is one of the world’s worst plastic polluters.
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Pepsico announced yesterday several initiatives to reduce the amount of plastic it uses for its beverages.
The food giant, with a market cap of around $184.35 billion, said that next year, its Lifewtr brand will be packaged in 100 percent recycled PET (a form of plastic that’s easier to recycle), Bubly sparkling water will no longer be sold in plastic bottles and Aquafina will be available in aluminum cans at food service outlets — the format will be tested in retail as well. Pepsi claims that these moves will eliminate more than 8,000 metric tons of virgin plastic and approximately 11,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental activist organization Greenpeace found in a 2018 investigation that Pepsico, along with Coca-Cola and Nestlé, were the worst plastic polluters worldwide.
Pepsico, which in a press release says it is one of the largest users of recycled PET in the world, has set a goal to “make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable, compostable or biodegradable and use 25 percent recycled plastic content in all its plastic packaging” by 2025.
The move comes at a time when the plastic pollution crisis has choked our oceans and filled landfills around the world. Ocean Conservancy estimates that every year “8 million metric tons of plastics enter our ocean on top of the estimated 150 million metric tons that currently circulate our marine environments.”
Much of this plastic will take hundreds of years to break down.
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