Finished drinking that Coke? Don’t throw away the empty bottle. Turn it into a pencil sharpener.

Coca-Cola knows that the downside of drinking lots of Coke is the litter that results from trashing the empties. Coke wants consumers to give the bottle a second life, either through recycling or repurposing. To promote this idea, Coke turned to ad agency Ogilvy & Mather China to come up with another use for the bottles. The agency developed a 2nd Lives kit that contains 16 modified screw-on caps that will turn empty bottles into bubble blowers, whistles, paint applicators, squirt guns, pencil sharpeners, baby rattles, hand weights, condiment dispensers, spray bottles, drums, and other functional tools and toys. To start, Coke gave away 40,000 2nd Lives kits to customers in Vietnam. Coke’s 2nd Lives initiative extends the bottle’s usefulness and, hopefully, the bottle will find its 3rd life in a plastics recycling plant.
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