About
The campaign introduces a documentary-style short video, an original EP consisting of the sounds taken from the recycling process and produced by Mark Ronson and Madlib, and an interactive website accompanied by a series of vintage posters and a built-in synthesiser.
As Bottle Records decodes and identifies the design practices of over-simplifications and greenwashing in Coca-Cola’s Recycled Records campaign, it also investigates the actual life cycle of a Coca-Cola plastic bottle, from its inception marketing to its production, to its consumption, and especially to its disposal.
This plastic bottle plays a crucial part in both plastic pollution and the system of colonialism. Pollution isn’t an unintentional by-product of economic growth; instead, it is a deliberate choice, and the choice is to pollute unevenly, to shift the blame for a lack of infrastructure in the ‘less developed’ countries and to eventually gain constant access to Land by offering ongoing, ‘civilised’ solutions to the climate crisis (Liboiron, 2021). As it travels across continents, this plastic bottle leaves its environmental, social, and political impact on each stage of its life cycle.
The project, Bottle Records, first adopted methods of iterating to source and build an image collection and then developed three catalogues out of this image collection through sequencing, (re)contextualising and captioning. It provides viewers with alternative narratives to understand the plastic pollution challenges that we are facing.
Abdulla, D. (2022) ‘On the Contradictions of Sustainability’ [Recorded talk]. Futuress. 22 November 2022. Available at: https://futuress.org/learning/contradictions-of-sustainability/ (Accessed: 5 February 2024).
Bratton, B. (2013) 'We need to talk about TED', The Guardian, 30 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted (Accessed: 15 February 2024).
The Coca-Cola Company (no date) The Coca-Cola System. Available at: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/coca-cola-system (Accessed: 11 February 2024).
The Coca-Cola Company (2022) Recycled Records. Available at: https://greentoclear.com/ (Accessed: February 19, 2024).
Koolhaas, R. (2018) Elements of architecture. Koln: Taschen.
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution Is Colonialism, Duke University Press,. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6527589 (Accessed: 6 February 2024)
Marten, K. and Fitzpatrick, C. (2017) Motion. Kunstverein München and Roma Publications.
Ong, J. (2020) “Absence in design is very important”: Karel Martens on paying attention to the things we don’t see. Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/karel-martens-re-printed-matter-graphic-design-020920 (Accessed: 12 February 2024).
Rock, M. (2009) Fuck Content. Available at: https://2x4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/ (Accessed: 16 November 2023).