A label-free beverage bottle developed for the South Korean market uses embossed branding to replace conventional labels, eliminating one of the main obstacles to efficient bottle recycling. By integrating brand identification directly into the bottle wall, the design allows bottles to enter recycling streams without additional processing, supporting cleaner material flows and higher-quality recycled output.
The embossed approach preserves shelf recognition and visual appeal, while avoiding the need for manual label removal—supporting both operational efficiency and material purity in recycling processes.
The bottle is designed to integrate into a closed-loop PLA recycling system established by TotalEnergies Corbion and Sansu (i’m eco). Post-consumer bottles are collected, pre-processed, and chemically recycled via hydrolysis, breaking PLA down into its original building block—lactic acid monomer—which is then reused to produce new recycled Luminy® PLA (rPLA) with consistent material performance.
Made from Luminy® PLA, TotalEnergies Corbion’s biobased plastic designed for recycling and composting, the bottle demonstrates how material innovation and recycling infrastructure can be aligned to enable circular reuse at scale.
