Opportunity Defined

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?

A Bunch Of Nuts And A Bolt

I never thought I'd grow up to be a coffee drinker. But then again, I am a lot of things I never thought I'd be. It usually takes me about two giant cups of coffee to get through a typical day now. If it's really bad, I might need three, but then the jitters set in and I become volatile, like a nervous squirrel handling nitro glycerin.

I have come to like really good coffee, the kind that I can't get here at work. Back before I was a coffee drinker I got some 100% Kona and even back then I knew it was good stuff. Now I drink the local industrial kitchenette variety, rough and tumble with a finish like licking a rusty fender. But I guess I shouldn't complain, it's hot and carries the requisite load of caffeine I require.

Coffee is a funny thing, isn't it? We take some beans, dry them out and roast them and grind them up and run hot water through them. Then we drink the resulting brown liquid. Who ever dreamed that up? Did they try it first with a range of really nasty and sometimes fatally poisonous beans and seeds, only to decide by default that only coffee did the trick? I'm sure the coffee plant has been bred by humans to be more tolerable over the years, the early, natural varieties were undoubtedly harsher and more primitive. So it must have been one wicked-tired adventurer that first dreamed up that brewing process. I'm sure the rest of the tribe looked at him like he was out of his mind. I'm not so sure he wasn't.

But crazy or not, thanks dude!