Game changer Pepsi snaps up company with an ocean-cleaning ‘Holy Turtle’

The days of needing to buy Pepsi in a plastic bottle from a shop may be coming to an end, after it bought Sodastream, one of the world’s most environmentally -friendly firms.

The $3.2 billion (£2.4 billion) takeover came as Sodastream sent 150 employers to the Caribbean to clean up plastic waste in the sea and unveiled a new $1 million (£760,000) rubbish-gathering machine, nicknamed The Holy Turtle.

The company, which has UK origins, has recently seen its value rocket, as what was once a Seventies gimmick is now being viewed as a clever environmental solution.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph in Roatán, a Honduran island, Daniel Birnbaum, the chief executive of Sodastream, said: “We realised [Sodastream] could replace all those bottles, it could be huge. The magnitude of the threat from plastic is hard to comprehend. We have to stop the problem at its source. My mission is to try to create a movement and a community.”

This week, Jim Andrew, Pepsico’s head of strategy, also flew out to Roatán for the plastic clean up, a signal that the drinks manufacturer intends to embrace Birnbaum’s vision. The trip coincided with a test of Sodastream’s ocean clean-up device, that uses 1,000ft of floating booms in a U shape to capture surface plastic in a similar way to how oil slicks are rounded up and neutralised. It has holes to prevent marine life becoming trapped.