The Unibody Coca-Cola Can

It doesn’t only look beautiful and it will make Jon Ive and Steve Jobs wet, but this naked Coca-Cola can would help save energy while reducing air and water pollution. Would it really make a difference? Let’s do some maths:

I assume the consumption only increases through time, but let’s take the daily 2007 numbers from Global INForM Cases Sales database, the total number of Coca-Cola cans sold per worldwide is 67,873,309. Diet Coke and Coke Zero sold 35,387,241, while MyCoke sold 103,260,550. Yes, that’s all per day.

So taking only the classic Coca-Cola, that’s 24,773,757,785 every year. Twenty-four billion cans. That is indeed a lot of paint and paint removal products. Because this doesn’t only affect the production. It also affects the recycling, which will eliminate a step:

The naked can help to reduce air and water pollution occurred in its colouring process. It also reduces energy and effort to separate toxic colour paint from aluminium in recycling process. Huge amount of energy and paint required to manufacture coloured cans will be saved. Instead of toxic paint, manufacturers process aluminium with a pressing machine that indicates brand identity on surface.

Sounds good to me, and it even looks better if you take into account all kinds of Coke. That brings up the number to 75,380,201,500 cans. I don’t know how much paint that represents, but I’m guessing quite a few thousand tons. [7760 via Likecool, Sales info from Let's Get Together]