Turning old carpets and other hard-to-recycle waste into recycled bottles

When you finish a bottle of your favorite PepsiCo beverage, what happens next? Ideally, that bottle gets recycled to be used again.

That idea sits at the heart of packaging circularity: keeping used packaging materials in use by turning them into new packaging again and again. While recycling can sound simple, the reality is more complex. Some plastic products, such as most beverage bottles, move easily through today’s recycling systems depending on where you live and what your city’s infrastructure can handle. Other plastics, despite being used as part of everyday life, are not easily recycled and too often end up as waste in landfills.

But what if some of those other plastics — like old clothing, carpet fibers, harder-to-recycle plastic bottles, jars or films — which most often can’t be recycled by traditional means, could be given new life? What if they could be prevented from ending up as plastic waste by being turned into high-quality, food grade, recycled beverage bottles? It has the potential to be a gamechanger for the future of packaging circularity.

That’s what PepsiCo is aiming to do through a multi-year agreement with Eastman, purchasing materials produced by their novel advanced recycling technology which repurposes discarded hard-to-recycle polyester plastic waste, reducing reliance on virgin plastic and delivering more of our products in recycled packaging.

The results are starting to show up in real life. In 2026, PepsiCo began rolling out Gatorade bottles in the U.S. made with recycled plastic enabled by Eastman’s technology, demonstrating how materials once headed for waste streams can be turned into high‑quality, specially designed beverage packaging.

“It’s exciting because with this technology, plastics that otherwise couldn’t be recycled are being recycled, which allows for more recycled content to be incorporated into packaging that have historically required virgin quality materials to create,” said Burgess Davis, PepsiCo’s North America chief sustainability officer.

What is advanced recycling?

Traditional, or “mechanical,” recycling works well for many clear plastic bottles. It’s when used plastic is sorted, cleaned, melted, and reshaped into new packaging. This is the process most local municipalities use to recycle the bottles you toss in your blue bins at home that get collected curbside each week. Continuing efforts to improve and invest in these systems is a key element of PepsiCo’s sustainable packaging strategy.

But mechanical recycling cannot process certain types of commonly used plastic materials. Additionally, packaging that can be recycled via mechanical recycling, such as clear bottles, tend to lose their clear aesthetic after being recycled this way multiple times.

Advanced recycling technologies can go a step further and provide a solution for these challenges.

“Eastman’s technology takes colored and opaque plastic bottles and other everyday plastic materials that mechanical recyclers do not process, breaks them down to their original molecular level and purifies them, so they can be rebuilt into high-quality virgin-like bottles made with recycled plastic that can be easily customized to fit the packaging design needs of a given product,” said Lindsay Bridenbaker, PepsiCo’s vice president of global beverages packaging R&D.

From waste to new packaging

PepsiCo leverages advanced recycling technologies solely to create new packaging made from hard-to-recycle plastic materials that would otherwise end up as waste so that more recycled content can be incorporated in more packaging across our portfolio.

But the truth is there is no single fix for plastic waste. Building more circular packaging systems requires better design, improved collection, stronger recycling infrastructure, enabling policies, and continued innovation.

By investing in multiple approaches, including advanced recycling, PepsiCo is working to reduce the need for virgin plastic and help keep plastic out of landfills. Because when everyday items can find a second life as a bottle on the shelf, packaging moves one step closer to a more circular future.

“Advanced recycling is not intended to replace mechanical recycling or be a silver bullet solution to solve the global challenge of packaging waste,” said David Allen, PepsiCo’s global vice president of sustainable packaging. “Instead, it’s meant to complement mechanical recycling and help recycle the materials that fall outside existing systems and expand what’s possible for packaging circularity.”