Coca-Cola Europacific Partners adds more partners in carbon capture and upcycling project
UK – Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) has signed two new partnership agreements with European research groups at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona, Spain, and the University of Twente (UT) in the Netherlands to ramp up the research of carbon capture technologies.
The newly announced partnerships aim to implement carbon capture across the corporation’s entire supply chain.
Through the research project, CCEP Ventures (CCEPV), the innovation investment arm of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, will explore how the captured CO2 can be turned into useful products for the supply chain like packaging materials and sugar.
CCEP will use the technology to reduce its carbon footprint to achieve its sustainability goal of reaching net zero by 2040. About a quarter of the company’s CO2 footprint is attributed to its use of agricultural ingredients like sugar.
The newly formed research agreement for both universities will focus on finding novel ways to turn carbon dioxide into a feedstock for sugars that are essential for the carbonation of soft drinks and are also a necessary component in synthetic fuels needed to power facilities.
The world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler had earlier teamed up with the Peidong Yang Research Group at the University of California Berkeley to develop scalable methods of converting captured CO2 into sugar.
The Peidong Yang Research Group were crowned winners of NASA CO2 Conversion Challenge.According to Peidong Yang – a campus chemistry professor, Coca-Cola was interested in the technology and reached out.
NASA had directed participants in the competition to find a novel, nonbiological process that converts carbon dioxide into glucose.
Yang also said Coca-Cola’s support will help them optimize their technology so that the team can be able to fully convert the formaldehyde and glycolaldehyde into glucose.
“The purity is not ideal… Certainly, Coca-Cola wants purer glucose. Then, the yield and production rates … are the two major bottlenecks we need to remove, and in the next few years we want to optimize both the selectivity and purity of a particular sugar and the production rates,” explained Mr. Yang.
Meanwhile, the first pilot installation for carbon capture for smelters was officially inaugurated earlier today using Aker Carbon Capture, which provided the Mobile Test Unit. The unit was connected to an Elkem plant for the production of ferrosilicon and micro-silica in Rana, Norway.
This first test is being run within the R&D CO2 HUB Nord project, which is set to run for a total of two years and is financed by the Climit Demo.
For all the latest food industry news from Africa and the World, subscribe to our NEWSLETTER, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, like us on Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
