World first: Coca-Cola HBC to use captured CO2 to add the fizz in soft drinks

Customers cracking open a can of Coca-Cola might soon be doing their bit to help tackle climate change, thanks to a new deal which will see a Coca-Cola bottler in Switzerland use CO2 captured from the air to make its soft drinks fizzy.

Coca-Cola HBC Switzerland, a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, announced yesterday it has teamed up with atmospheric carbon capture pioneers Climeworks to use carbon dioxide sucked from the air in its production process.

It will be the first time a commercial drink has been made using carbon dioxide extracted directly from the air, the two companies claimed.

Climeworks said it is working with a company called Pentair Union Engineering, a world leader in the purification of CO2, to make sure the CO2 it captures is safe to use in food processing.

"By entering the beverage market with Coca-Cola HBC as a global key player, we are continuing our path of commercialising our Direct Air Capture technology, which began with the world's first commercial plant in May 2017," said Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher.

Since launching in 2017, Climeworks has developed a plant in Iceland that is storing captured CO2 underground in basalt rock, and secured a suite of contracts with companies paying to offset their emissions impact.

The company is now working on ambitious plans to capture one per cent of global CO2 emissions by 2025.

It hopes the beverage industry could help fund this ambition - the global drinks sector uses 10 million tonnes of CO2 a year, and could therefore provide a useful outlet for Climeworks' captured CO2 on a mass scale, giving the company the cash to scale its technology. 

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• Topics
• R&D
• CO2
• Carbon Capture and Storage
• Climeworks
• Coca-Cola