Greenpeace is targeting Coca-Cola in its latest campaign, a crowd-funded TV ad that is a call-to-action for Australia’s "Cash for Containers" recycling program, which they say the giant bottler has sabotaged. “Behind Coke’s slogans and sunshine, the beverage giant is trashing Australia,” said Reece Turner, senior campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific. 

In March, Coca-Cola won its court case to stop a recycling refund scheme in the Northern Territory—a program that doubled recycling rates and has run successfully in South Australia for more than 30 years, according to Greenpeace. The program added 10 cents to retail prices for manufacturers like Coke, but consumers would get a refund for recycling the containers in appropriate bins. 

Clean Up Australia estimates that Australians use between 13 to 14 billion drinks containers a year and that 45 percent of the plastic waste that is collected on Clean Up Australia Day is beverage industry-related. “This loose rubbish is estimated to affect up to 65 percent of Australian seabirds. Some mistake the plastic for food. When they swallow too much, their tiny stomachs become so full they're unable to ingest any food—literally starving to death on a full stomach,” according to Greenpeace.Continue reading...

As Kermit the Frog taught an entire generation, “It's not easy being green.”

Clorox’s Green Works is a case study in the steep learning curve of green branding. The line of environmentally friendly housecleaning products launched in 2008 with an endorsement from the Sierra Club, which helped boost its market penetration and credibility. 

That $1.3 million contract ends in December and the brand chose Earth Day to announce a strategic marketing revamp, including a new tone of voice (embodied by its new manifesto, posted on Facebook and its website) and the removal of the Sierra Club logo from all Green Works packaging, a clear sign of the times as green cleaning products have been forced to reduce their premium prices and re-position the sell to deflect declining sales.Continue reading...

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...

Swedish fashion house H&M is continuing its green streak with the official launch of its Garment Recycling Program.

The second-largest clothing retailer in the world will accommodate the program in all of its 269 U.S. locations as well as all 48 of its global markets. Beginning today, customers can bring any garment from any brand in any condition into an H&M store. For every bag of clothes donated, customers will receive a 15 percent off voucher for their next item purchased. 

"We believe this program will really make an impact in reducing the amount of clothing that ends up in landfills all over the world," said H&M spokesperson Marybeth Schmitt in a press release. 

Additionally, H&M is teaming up with Global Green USA, who will be the sole beneficiary of the recycling program. The donated clothing will be handled by H&M's partner, I:Collect, which repeatedly reprocesses the garments for new use.Continue reading...

Nespresso has been riding the home barista trend, as consumers and gift-givers shelled out about $600 for counter-top coffee makers this holiday season.

But what to do with those crushed capsules? One enterprising idea is seeing them used as the basis for a handmade, custom timepiece as part of the Grand Cru collection produced by high-end watchmaker Blancier. At least you'll always know when it's time for a coffee.

it may sound crazy, but the idea didn’t come from an overly caffeinated designer at the German-owned Blancier, which specializes in customized watchmaking and has offered weekend DIY workshops. In fact, it was Blancier co-owner Willem Kamerman who thought of the idea while standing in line at a Nespresso boutique, according to Watchpro.

"We don't reuse the cups; we turn the waste into something more attractive and valuable,” Kamerman commented. “We move up the chain. Every time you look at the watch you're made aware that you don't have to throw everything away."Continue reading...

In 2011, the Levi's brand released 1.5 million pairs of Water‹Less jeans, which will increase to 29 million by year-end for a savings of 360 million liters of water to date. Now it's taking its sustainability efforts to the proverbial garbage dump, with a new Waste<Less denim collection that will, once again, put the world's largest maker of jeans worldwide (sales of $4.8 billion in 2011) at the forefront of sustainable brands.

Part of the Levi's Spring 2013 collection launching in January, the Waste‹Less denim collection will comprise about 400,000 men’s and women’s jeans and jean jackets made of eight crushed brown and green plastic bottles per pair and composed of at least 20% recycled plastic, in a process that reused about 3.5 million bottles and saved enough water to fill 144 Olympic-size swimming pools.

“This collection proves that you don’t have to sacrifice quality, comfort or style to give an end a new beginning,” stated James Curleigh, global president of the Levi's brand. “We don’t just want to reduce our impact on the environment, we want to leave it better than we found it.”Continue reading...

Biodegradable shoes and clothing doesn’t sound like a brilliant idea at first. Images of shirts suddenly washing off bodies in a heavy rain or sneakers unexpectedly disintegrating on a hot day come to mind.

But the brand stewards at Puma are asking consumers to just dump all those silly ideas into a compost heap. The company, which has been a leader on the environmental front, is now producing a limited collection of biodegradable clothes and shoes to start selling in 2013 in order to capitalize on the ever-growing global love for all things green. Finally, the brand will have some shoes and gear to go with its Clever Little Bag sustainable packaging that launched in 2010.

"We have decided that sustainability is a mega-trend," chief executive Franz Koch told Reuters, which sees the move as a bid to shore up the brand's green track record against competitors Nike and Adidas. "We want to contribute to a better world. At the same time, we also want to carve out our competitive advantage." ("Better world" was likely an unintentional reference to the umbrella brand for Nike's corporate citizenship and sustainability efforts).Continue reading...

The world talks a good game when it comes to reusing and recycling, but when it comes down to reality, even when companies are making it easy or offering up incentives, the average consumer isn’t always thinking globally and acting locally – especially before they’ve had their first cup of joe in the morning.

Starbucks (up 11 percent in Interbrand's new Best Global Brands report) has been trying to get its customers to bring in their own drinking receptacles or at least buy one at the coffee retailer that they can bring back, but so far, the Seattle-based company’s efforts haven’t had a huge effect.

According to its own critique in its latest Global Responsibility Report, the percent of customers that use a reusable cup has been less than two percent for the last three years.

And it’s not because Starbucks isn’t trying to push eco-awareness, even as it has downsized its reusable cup goals. The company offers free coffee to those who bring in their own cups on Earth Day and this past January found some customers getting their coffee for free all month if they bought a particular Starbucks tumbler. And folks who show up on any other day of the year with their mug, cup, boot, or whatever other beverage container get a 10-cent discount on their coffee.

Now Starbucks is taking another angle toward trying to get its customers to bring in their own receptacles by selling a $1 Grande cup that should last consumers for 30 trips to the coffee machine.Continue reading...