Coca-Cola and its various beverage logos may seem ubiquitous to most urban dwellers but Chicagoans are about to get an imagery overdose of Coke-owned products on an odd location: recycling can lids. 

In a timely bit of news for Earth Day the week, the Coca-Cola Foundation has agreed to grant $2.59 million to the city of Chicago to provide 50,000 blue recycling carts so that the city’s houses and smaller apartment buildings have access to recycling, the Chicago Tribune reports.

In return, Coke gets to plaster its logo and the logo of all of its many brands onto the can lids. This means that 25,000 carts/Coke ads will be sitting in front of people’s homes by year’s end. The rest will come over the next five years as carts get replaced.

“We see this as an incredible way to be able to give back to Chicago, give back to the United States, and to be able to keep our pledge, which is to be sure that every bottle, plastic bottle, can in which our products are packaged and sold will find its way back into a recycling bin,” said Sonya Soutus, a Coca-Cola marketing exec, the newspaper reports.Continue reading...

As brands around the world celebrate Earth Day, it is becoming more apparent that creative, effective marketing will be a vital factor in the adoption of green consumer products and practices. Years have passed since terms like "green" and "sustainability" became part of the lexicon, but little has changed when it comes to consumer behavior that effects the environment. Joel Makower, author and chairman of GreenBiz Group blames "half-hearted, humorless and uninspired," marketing efforts that push "underwhelming, overpriced, inconvenient, ineffective or unavailable," green products. 

Initiated in 1970 by Denis Hayes, 20 million Americans gathered for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform. Today, more than one billion people in nearly 200 nations recognize Earth Day and its goals. This year's Earth Day theme revolves around climate change and all those affected by it, from "a man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise," to "the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent brushfires and droughts."Continue reading...

“Think Green!” has long been the rallying cry for anybody who has his or her mind on helping the global environment. VW, which has never been afraid to be a little bit different from everybody else, has been encouraging everybody to “Think Blue.” April is Earth Month around the world and VW is celebrating with a new blue-themed ad campaign.

Set to a modernized version of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” the new campaign “Think Blue.Book,” features the automaker’s Eco Up!, “the most efficient natural gas car in Germany and also among the cheapest on sale in Europe,” according to AutoEvolution.com. The car uses just 6.4 pounds of compressed natural gas every 100 covered kilometers (62.1 miles).Continue reading...

Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer packaged goods company in the world, set a goal in 2010 to achieve zero consumer and manufacturing waste to landfills. Now, in just three years, the company has announced it has reached the goal in 45 sites worldwide.

The mammoth company—which serves approximately 4.6 billion people in 75 countries—behind consumer brands including Bounty, Gillette, Ariel, Tide, Crest, Head & Shouders and Pampers has a longer-term vision that includes using 100 percent renewable or recycled materials for all products and packaging, less than .5 percent of manufacturing waste to landfills and powering plants with 100 percent renewable energy. The brand has created over $1 billion in value from waste since 2008.Continue reading...

It’s been more than 1,500 years since Saint Patrick was laid to rest and could no longer use the shamrock to explain to Christians the idea of the Holy Trinity. Thanks to St. Patrick's Day every March 17th, his legacy inspires millions the world over to consume massive amounts of alcohol and shout “Top of the morning to ya!” to anyone who passes. With such a jovial reputation, you can bet that brands, alcoholic or not, take advantage of the built-in marketing ploy—and not just those participating in Pantone's color of the year for 2013.Continue reading...

Two years ago, Americans were throwing away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour, according to SmartPlanet.com.

Coca-Cola, which is responsible for a good number of the beverage bottles floating around America, is trying to make its containers more environmentally friendly — as is its chief rival, PepsiCo, which is promoting its plant-based PET bottle.

The latest volley in the green bottle rivalry: Coke's marketers are touring college campuses, including visiting Alabama’s Samford University and other colleges in the South to “create awareness for their PlantBottle packaging initiative,” according to the Samford Crimson.

The college marketing tour will help Coke test consumer preferences among the all-important 18-24 demo for its eco-friendly bottles in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville in three different beverage sizes: 12.5, 16, and 20 ounces.Continue reading...

Ikea is embarking on a massive environmental project this month, introducing corrugated cardboard pallets instead of wooden in a move intended to make its 10 million pallets used annually more sustainable and cost-efficient. The furniture retailer previously tested recycled polypropylene plastic loading ledges as an alternative to wooden pallets. As Bloomberg Businessweek notes, the company could also save an estimated $193 million per year by scrapping wooden pallets. [image via Core77]

Coca-Cola wants you to know that, sure, it could have waited until its initial 2020 target date to guarantee that its PlantBottles would all be made from 100-percent plant-based materials. The company also wants you to know that it has moved up that timetable by several years. This week the beverage giant announced multi-million-dollar partnership agreements with three biotech companies in an initiative meant to achieve that acceleration.

"At 30 percent [plant-based materials in its bottles already], we already have a commercial solution that we've deployed in 20 countries over the past two years," Rick Frazier, Coke's vice president of commercial product supply, said on a media call on Thursday. "We could have taken several years to refine that to 100 percent [with a new process] and then started a slow rollout. But we chose to make a difference immediately," he added.

Of course, this promise doesn't mean Coke will be able to roll out 100-percent plant-based bottles to consumers by then. Or, as the New York Times notes today, that Coca-Cola will beat PepsiCo, which has espoused ambitious sustainability goals in regard to its plant-bottle technology.Continue reading...