Drinking Coca-Cola or any other artificially sweetened soft-drinks lead to obesity and you know it . But this hasn’t stopped anyone from regularly purchasing and drinking coke and over 650 of its variants across the world. As the half-liter bottle has increasingly replaced the average 300 ml can, another problem besides obesity and high sugar related diseases has cropped up; Plastic Pollution.
While it is much less environmentally polluting, packing coke in a plastic bottle than it is to use Aluminum cans, the ill-effects of using plastic bottle are apparent once the soft-drink within, is consumed. These plastic bottles are seldom recycled judiciously or consciously. More often than not, these plastic bottles are simply discarded haphazardly and easily end up in landfills.
Plastic bottles, when left to rot in the landfills, take many years to disintegrate. In the meantime, they leech out harmful chemicals that further pollute the land and water reserves that may be underneath.
While little can be done to persuade people to limit their consumption of Coca-Cola and related products, these containers have to be recycled in order to limit their harmful impact on mother earth. One of the simplest and best techniques is to reuse these bottles and that is precisely what Coca-Cola managed to offer in its latest campaign.
No stranger to inventive campaigns , the iconic brand recently teamed up with China’s Ogilvy & Mather to create the “2 nd Lives” program, which takes used plastic Coke bottles and turns them into so much more. Using the primary container and merely replacing the caps or lids that served various purposes, Coca-Cola was able to transform the otherwise-useless left-over plastic bottle into something creative, fun and perpetually usable. This environmentally friendly campaign was launched in Vietnam, where 40,000 free caps were given away when purchasing any of the products from the Coca-Cola Company, reported Bored Panda .
Answering the eternally perplexing question, “What if they (the bottles) had a life after Coke?,” the “2 nd Lives” campaign introduces 16 re-imagined bottle caps that transform an empty bottle into useful, everyday products like a lamp, a paintbrush, a spray bottle, a pencil sharpener, a soap dispenser, and many other similarly simple, yet highly usable objects, reported Paste Magazine .
The beauty of the campaign is the plethora of benefits it offers. From Coca-Cola’s perspective, the eco-conscious campaign can easily be replicated across the globe, irrespective of the demographic. Moreover, given the quantum of empty plastic bottles generated and discarded every day, these re-imagined caps can easily offer a fresh lease of life to the bottles and easily help protect the environment by keeping them away from the landfills for a much longer duration. If that’s not all, the caps will help children and adults have some fun and functionality from an otherwise mundane object which quickly extinguishes its purpose.
With this campaign Coca-Cola has surely come-up with a brilliant concept that has the potential to go viral.
[Image Credit | Bored Panda, GIFT]
