Green or Not?

While we’re waiting to see how the new status-water from Nestle (see yesterday’s post) turns out, let me direct your attention to the bottle itself, just for a moment. Coke has a new packaging idea that may or may not add value and certainly appears to be drawing some debate in terms of whether or not it is in fact a green, or environmentally sensitive, packaging. This new bottle actually keeps the beverage inside of it ice-cold and completely dissolves after you’re through with it, leaving no garbage to clean up, nothing to recycle, and no chemical residue or energy requirements to do either. It does have a little problem of melting in any situation where the ambient temperature goes above 32 degrees F (0 degrees C), though…

A story on the Ad Week site talks about a new Coca-Cola offering being marketed in South America that consists of “bottles” made almost entirely out of ice (they have a little plastic label so you can hold the bottle without freezing your fingers, and so there’s someplace to put the product name and the nutritional information). When you’re done with your Coke, you can just leave it in the sink and the bottle will melt and run down the drain – or you can throw it in the trash and let thermodynamics take its course. This would be particularly useful in a public venue, such as a beach (where broken glass in the sand is a constant hazard) or a park; although I’m not sure it would be a good idea in a sports arena (where there will already be enough puddles from spilled Coke and beer on the floor) or an amusement park…

On the down side, while it does require less energy to freeze water into ice than it does to make a plastic bottle, it does still take some – and the energy requirements to ship the bottles in a refrigerated truck and keep them in the freezer until needed is potentially much higher than that needed to make plastic bottles. And as the folks over at the environmentalist site Take Part note, these ice bottles also require pure water – a resource that most of the people in the world, and far too many people in South America, don’t have in the first place. Using thousands or millions of gallons of drinkable water from a limited supply for this purpose seems heartless, and that doesn’t even consider the contamination issues from dirt, germs or insects given that ice doesn’t really make a good food container in the first place…

You could get around some of these problems by shipping the beverages and the bottles separately – which is to say, not shipping either one; you’d just send the Coke syrup to the distribution point and have your agent on site mix it with water and carbonation (to make the product) and freeze water into bottle shapes and fill them as needed. At that point the product was clean and pure when you handed it to the consumer, and anything that happens to it after that is not your responsibility. But at that point the delivery vehicle you’re replacing is more of a cup than a bottle, and you still have the same issues with refrigeration and clean water supplies. In the final analysis, I don’t think the ice bottle (whatever Coke ends up calling it) is going to work out – but I still think it’s less ridiculous than marketing tap water as a prestige item…