by Rachel Cernansky, Boulder, Colorado

One-upping Pepsi’s plant-based bottle scheduled to be piloted next year, the Odwalla PlantBottle is now at least 96 percent and up to 100 percent plant-based materials—and is still recyclable in existing facilities. It’s only the Odwalla bottles that are 100 percent, not Coke’s other products. The Dasani bottle, for example, is 30 percent plant-based at best. But it’s still the first beverage in a bottle of its kind to be available nationwide, and it’s on shelves now.

The company touts that the size of the bottle has also been reduced, although given the rising costs of food and an industry-wide trend, seems like this is more a cost-saving measure for the company rather than an effort to save plastic.

The bottles are made from sugarcane—and like biofuels, using agricultural land for non-food crops isn’t an ideal solution.

The sugarcane for the PlantBottles comes from Brazil, and the company had this to say about the practices:

Most growers in Brazil recycle process water and increasingly use organic fertilizers. Today, about 50 percent of the sugarcane in the Sao Paulo area, the main sugarcane region, is harvested mechanically, which eliminates the need to burn fields. Growers in the region have agreed to stop all burning of fields by 2017.
Odwalla added that the long-term goal is to make recyclable plastic bottles from plant-based waste. Hope they reach it soon.
“source: www.treehugger.com”