Green gauntlet: Pepsi develops plant-based bottle

Plastic bottles. They're everywhere. They're clogging drains, floating in the Schuylkill and way too often being sent to landfills instead of recycling bins. As such, they've become one of the latest eco-culprits.

The industry has responded by coming up with better bottles. For instance, they've made the bottles lighter, using less material.

Earlier this month, PepsiCo unveiled its latest, a bottle that is "plant-based" and still recyclable.

So I'm putting it out there as part of a new blog feature debuting today: Green Gauntlet. It's where YOU, the reader, get to say whether it's as green as purported, simply by commenting below.

The raw materials for this new bottle include switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. The company plans to expand its source materials to stuff like orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its foods business.

They're still calling it a "PET plastic bottle" because that's what it resembles. The company says that by combining biological and chemical processes, it has been able to create a molecular structure that is identical to petroleum-based PET (polyethylene terephthalate), "which results in a bottle that looks, feels and protects its product identically to existing PET beverage containers."

PepsiCo plans to bring the bottle to market as a pilot in 2012, and then, assuming all goes well, move to full-scale commercial production.

So we ask: Is this an improvement? Is it something those who care about the environment will want?

Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, was certainly impressed. "This is the beginning of the end of petroleum-based plastics," he told the Associated Press. "When you have a company of this size making a commitment to a plant-based plastic, the market is going to respond."

My friend Sylvie Verdant isn't so sure. She lives in a solar-powered treehouse and frequently stomps over to berate me. I hear her biodegradeable clogs on my front walk and know that she'll soon be in my kitchen, hands on hemp-clad hips, finding fault. But I think she's wonderful, and I refuse to countenance the suggestion that she's merely a figment of my imagination.

Sylvie points out that the bottle, while recyclable, will in all likelihood only be used once before being sent off for further processing. It will still have to get to the store on some big truck. And she's not sure which beverages will be in these bottles. (She's anti-soda. She has a reusable bottle and fills it at the spigot.)

"Nice try," she sniffed when I told her about the bottle.

But in a rare moment of compromise, she addmitted, "at least it's an improvement."  Especially if society has decided that plastic bottles are still a good way to get supplies to people in emergency situations.

We'd both like to know what you think, so we're hoping you'll comment below. Click here to read a press release with more information.