Square redesign of the Coke bottle
core77.com
core77.com
The author of the article should try to crash a closed bottle... He would both learn physics and understand why his claim is wrong.
I don't buy that this bottle would be eco-friendly in the short or long run.
That's only true if the bottle is fully cylindrical, whereas most soda bottles have the narrower top and further narrowing along the body.
the marginal fuel cost of shipping bottled beverages depends much more on weight than volume.
Also only true if you don't take into account the overhead of the shipping mechanism. If you're trucking these across the USA, then reducing volume by half means you need half as many trucks and a comparable savings in fuel.
From a marketing perspective, you could make a new flavor and call it Hexa-Cola. I'd try it just for the name and hexagonal bottle. (If you think that's a silly reason to drink a particular beverage, then consider this: the name is probably the only reason people drink Tentacle Grape soda. Names matter when flavors are so similar.)
As another example, many laundry detergent makers have started making "3x concentrated" detergent, which is basically the same number of loads as a regular jug but in a smaller bottle, and they advertise that part of the reason for it is that it reduces shipping costs. Now the weight change there wouldn't be as much because we're not talking about packing efficiency, but it's an example that reducing volume by itself does reduce shipping costs for these companies.
I don't know for certain that reducing the volume by 50% will guaranteed reduce fuel costs because that's a lot of math to do, but I think it's a good guess based on the above info.
With laundry detergent, they have smaller caps to fill so at least if you pay attention then you won't over-use it.
I've also noticed that a lot of food product vendors are turning the old 'more is cheaper' paradigm upside down. I keep running into products where the 24oz container is more expensive than two of the 12oz containers, etc. It's just like the extra large pizza scams.
Coca-Cola spent millions of dollars on optimizing this in the 90s. I would not care to bet that on casual inspection you've noticed something obvious that they missed.
We had fun throwing 2L bottles on the floor. If they struck the floor smack on the bottom of the bottle they would bounce back up. The impact increases the pressure inside the bottle. We'd do this a couple of times, then the last drop would be top down, hopefully breaking the cap launching a coke powered rocket to the roof! That's the quickest way to break the bottle without using tools I think.
Come on though, this isn't hacker news. It's a square bottle - eg a carton. Which doesn't make any sense for a bottle of drink. Uncomfortable to hold, it looks idiotic. It's a non starter.
Also by making the bottle square, you're actually using more bottle material than you need to - cylinder is the most efficient shape to hold contents. Way to waste plastic...
I would also guess that manufacturing a square bottle is far harder and takes more effort/power/"carbon" than manufacturing a round one.
Glass bottles had a lower carbon footprint because you could wash them out and they were as good as new. Plastic in a landfill is plastic in a landfill. Forever.
Most soft drink bottles still say "non-refillable" on them, even though no refilling services exist, even if you wanted to.
Even more, most people agree that it is "tastier" (just because it keeps cold better I suspect, and I hope it's not because something from the plastic container seeps into it!)
It then chills the bottle. It could do this by pumping refrigerated water into the bottle and then extracting it again.
Finally, it rolls a label onto the outside of the bottle and fills it with a refreshing beverage. Optionally, it could then seal the bottle.
This machine is then installed like a vending machine, but with far greater capacity (it could mix drinks with filtered water on site) and lower cost.
Indeed, but in some (most?) countries plastic is recycled too (or incinerated, there's no reason to put it in a hole in the ground).
Glass in a landfill is glass in a landfill, forever, too. The benefits of recycling requires the actual recycling part. PET, from which soda bottles are made, is recyclable, much lighter than glass, and much easier to re-shape. The used bottles are basically shredded, melted and re-cast.
Except for the experience of drinking an ice-cold Coke from a glass-bottle, PET bottles are pretty much universally a better choice.
This isn't a radical or new idea, but still a good one. Even better would be to use biodegradable plastics, but that's not an idea that saves money.
Look out your window. Do you see a bottling factory? Then that can of carbonated corn syrup got shipped to you, probably over some distance. That is not "green" by any stretch of the imagination.
By the way, I'm not knocking people for enjoying carbonated beverages. They just shouldn't claim they're being "green" by e.g., recycling the container, or making the container in a slightly different fashion.
True. Of course, the water which comes out of your tap travelled some distance, too. The water in the diet coke I drink travelled, from reservoir to bottling plant to distribution plant to store to me, a total distance of under 100 km. Compare that to someone drinking tap water in Phoenix, and tell me who has the greater environmental impact.
You would need a LOT of plastic.
There is a reason almost all drink containers are square, except for pressurized ones which are universally round.
It's pretty much impossible for it to be actually square. It would need to bulge either in or out.
Take a look at the bottom of a pressurized bottle, and notice it's not square either.
Would probably have been better to target a different soft drink, like Pepsi, Sprite, Seven Up, or Fanta, and go from there.
Branding is so amorphous for everything past Sprite, it would be a non-issue. When I think of Fanta, I now think of Spice Girls wannabes.
the problems are as swombat and Zev pointed out
1) missing cokes iconic shape
2) uncomfortable to hold square bottles.
So why not give the bottle some of that iconic shape in the middle? Go from square to a round with a wave through it?
I'm sure that geometrically this isn't a huge problem with modern manufacturing techniques.
I'm unsure how difficult it would be to get a shape like that to crush easily, but maybe it's possible.
I suspect the offset of the cap may cause problems with packability, as it seems the bottles need to be stacked in a proper order.
You're correct - my dad has supplied coke plants before. Boke bottles start out thick and test-tube shaped, with the threads on top and a stright tubular body. They are blown up into final proportions later.
The shape might not be a huge problem, but it might not be trivial either. To blow the preform into the bottle's final shape, it is reheated, and then air is forced into the preform, causing it to expand to fill the mold containing it. The issue you would see with a bottle like this is that when the preform is reheated, the plastic in the wall tends to flow depending on the final shape.
When you have sharp corners, like those displayed, it is difficult to maintain an even wall thickness on the final bottle. So you either have to use more plastic than you want to ensure a minimum wall thickness is kept, or risk having thin spots, which hurts the structural integrity of the bottle.
There is a reason that you don't see many square bottles. The ones you do see, like Fiji, are really thick to account for this. You can get away with thick bottles when you are charging $4 for a bottle of water. Less so when charging a quarter that price for soda.
How many times can it be recycled? Can it be recycled into something useful?
Without a constant stream of sugar-water, there is no way I'll be able to keep up my hip, high-paced lifestyle!
“…what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cup holders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cup holders it has.”
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-psychology-of-cupholder...
This is like having a programming student code a Hangman game. The point of that, what you expect your student to get out of it, is totally different than an assignment where you say "design and program any game."
One of the reasons that I tend to avoid Fiji water is because of the shape of the bottle (although, the environmental impact of the bottle and high price per bottle come ahead of the shape).
Oh, and while boxed water may be better, water from the faucet is definitely best.
Can we please, please, please stop trying to redesign everything under the sun, especially in the name of eco-friendliness or usability or some other such thing?
That is not to say that designs and decisions and concepts should not be questioned, but that they should not be questioned for questioning's sake. A lot of thought, time and effort goes into the design of recognizable brands and widely used things. Just because they are designed by behemoths does not necessarily mean that they don't know what they are doing. On the contrary I would think they have put a lot of thought into it and the designs work quite well given the constraints.
So if you are going to challenge it, please have something substantial that operates in the constraints that apply to the product, not just something that looks pretty.
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Why do people expect simple projects presented on a blog to have all the answers? Is it not possible to just take it on face value and entertain the idea?
Novelty can be fun, and it can attract customers. Why not try redesigning things for the fun of it? You don't have to make a New Coke every five months, but there should be a good amount of churn for its own sake.