Coca-Cola has announced plans to start selling its famous soft drink and other products in a new receptacle: a bottle “made from plants”, a.k.a. the “PlantBottle”. And the timing couldn’t be better.
With a long-standing marred image on the green front, the company said it would roll out its new bottles in Western Canada in December. As an age-old Olympic sponsor, they’re planning to get the best bang for their buck at the Vancouver Games. And the new packaging is already on the market in Denmark, just in time for a big, important conference in Copenhagen… I think to do with ‘green’, perhaps something connected with climate change?
Commendably, the new packaging will replace current petroleum-based plastic bottles with ones that are 30 percent made up of materials from sugar cane and molasses.
The question is, how do you market a new form of earth-friendly packaging, while sounding discreet about it? Turns out there’s a fine line between letting the public know you’ve changed your ways, and yelling, ‘we’re green! Now please buy more coke!’ Of course, it wouldn’t be prudent to engage in ecologically beneficial activity and not weigh in on the real benefit: more sales.
To do just that, Coca-Cola plans to use a simple, inconspicuous marketing approach. Just below its name on the bottle, a little green symbol will indicate that plant-based materials comprise part of its makeup. Tactics will not include prominent ads on TV or in newspapers touting how great they are, but will probably involve point-of-sale displays explaining the benefits of the new packaging, as will be the case at the Coca-Cola pavilion at the Olympic Games.
Eventually, Coca-Cola wants to go global with the new bottles. For now, they’re being placed where it matters the most.
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In the context of today’s world, ‘consuming’ and ‘balance’ in the same sentence seems to be an oxymoron.
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And how do we dispose of these ‘green’ bottles? Are they biodegradable, compostable, or even recyclable, or perhaps edible?
Edible – that would be awesome! hehe
Since the new bottles are partially made from plants, Coke claims they reduce their dependence on petroleum. And I believe that the bottles are 100 percent recyclable. Cokes research indicates that the carbon footprint for the PlantBottle packaging is smaller than bottles made with traditional PET which is a thermoplastic polymer.
I don’t even like say that word.. ther-mo-plastic polymer. Yuck!
I will remain sceptic until the people at Coke provide real proof it is a greener product…
Case in point, all polyethylene products are supposedly recyclable, yet egg ‘cartons’ cannot be recycled with bottles, even though both are number 1 plastics, because the egg boxes are molded at a different temperature than that of the bottles, and therefore is no longer the exact same polymer.
Photo-degradable plastics (oxo-biodegradable) are supposed to be recyclable, yet there are no facilities anywhere to process them, so they end up in the regular waste stream. Biodegradable plastics cannot be recycled with other plastics since they would render any subsequent product biodegradable (imagine your new recycled plastic lawn furniture crumbling under the summer sun… not pretty).
Personally, I think we should go back to refillable and endlessly reusable glass bottles, filled at a local refilling station, like in the ‘old days’. Cut down on transportation, create new jobs, re-open the bottling plants across thecontinent, including the one in PEI that closed two years ago.
Dahlia, that is a great point!
As long as glass bottles are refilled at local refilling stations and are continuously recycled they definitely are the way to go. Glass recycling is fully sustainable and glass itself is 100-percent recyclable. You can use it over and over again with no loss of purity or quality.
Glass recycling is also efficient. It has a proven history and is completely dependable. Apparently, 80 percent of all recycled glass eventually ends up as new glass containers. That sounds like a great track record to me!
The only problem I see with it – is getting people to recycle it regularly.