paper bottles
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In a recent article published by BBC, it was announced that The Coca-Cola Company is one of the latest companies to trial paper bottles instead of plastic. The company they are working with, Paboco -short for Paper Bottle Company, is a Danish sustainable packaging company created in 2019 as a joint venture between BillerudKorsnäs, a paper packaging materials developer and Alpla, the bottle manufacturing specialist. It was then developed from the low environmental footprint start-up, EcoXpac.

Coca-Cola was named the world’s number one plastic polluter by the charity group, Break Free From Plastic, last year. Still, the beverage giant pledged in 2018 to “help collect and recycle the equivalent of every bottle or can” sold worldwide by 2030 and to make 100% of their packaging recyclable globally by 2025.

This paper drinks container could revolutionise the drinks market by providing a 100% recycled, recyclable and biodegradable package for everyday consumers. To take a closer look at the sustainable solution developed by Paboco, we can turn to PatBase, the global patent database that makes searching, reviewing, and analysing patent text simple and effortless. Running a quick patent assignee search for EcoXpac locates 4 patent families on PatBase.

The patent publications disclose technical details and descriptions of the machinery and process used to create these ground-breaking paper bottles that have already been trialled by other beverage companies including Carlsberg and Absolute. This machinery processes the pulp and compresses it into a mould, effectively speeding up and reducing the cost of bottle production.

The Coca-Cola bottle design being trialled is not yet 100% plastic-free as it still requires a thin layer of plastic inside the bottle to prevent the contents from soaking through the container, and the lip and lid are made of recycled plastic. Paboco’s goal is to eventually reach full biodegradability so that if bottles are incorrectly discarded in nature, it will degrade into the soil without polluting the environment.

Patent documents are a great resource for R&D professionals, entrepreneurs, and inventors to find out more about existing innovations in a technology area. According to WIPO, “on average, 70% of the technical details found in a patent document are never published anywhere else”. PatBase is an ideal tool to get going with patent searching and analysis.

PatBase is a trusted patent search tool by many large FTSE 100, Fortune 500, DAX 30 corporations, as well as universities, law firms, and SMEs. The online platform enables international users to search in their native language across millions of patent documents at once, review machine-translated full-texts, and run an instant analysis on the powerful PatBase Analytics V3. Access vital technical information anytime and anywhere.

To learn more about how PatBase can help you with your patent research, get in touch with us at [email protected] to request a commitment-free two-week free trial!