Good Idea Of The Day, And Possibly The Century

Sometimes the best ideas really are the simplest ones.

The Coca-Cola Company manufactures and sells approximately 68 million cans of Coca-Cola, 35.5 million cans of Diet Coke, and 103 million cans of My Coke, per day. Yes, that's right, every day of every year, 206.5 million cans enter the world. That's close to 25 BILLION cans a year! Three times the weight of the Empire State Building.

That's a huge amount of aluminum. Luckily, aluminum is almost 100% recyclable so many of these cans have been cans before. Yes, it takes energy to recycle, but less energy than using plastic.

But now look at that shiny red label, painted on each and every can. That paint represents an obscene amount of chemical content that is toxic, environmentally dangerous, non-recyclable and very difficult to remove from the cans in the aluminum recycling process. Thousands of tons of paint, every day. They use more paint than the auto industry, and it all goes on a product with a life cycle of less than a couple of weeks. If you were to calculate the amount of energy those shiny paint jobs consume in their short lives, you would be appalled. You could run entire cities on that kind of energy. So, a smart designer came up with a very simple idea.

Don't paint the can.

What?!?! But Coke's identity is all tied up in the red and white color scheme, isn't it? Turns out, not so much. It’s the font and the swipe that really matter.

This designer came up with a simple stamping process that embosses the Coke logo into the surface of the can. It looks awesome, different, and although the cans are silver, they are very green too. And the amount of energy savings and pollution avoidance is so large it's almost difficult to imagine.

While this is still in concept stages, and a ways away from implementation, it looks like Coca-Cola likes the idea and they are moving forward with it. Remember, it's a huge cost savings to them, so as long as it doesn't harm their brand, why would they not do this?