The quest to design more sustainable bottles has led a quartet of companies – Danish beer maker Carlsberg, spirits company Absolut (part of France’s Pernod Ricard), French personal care company L’Oreal and a European group of beverage firm Coca-Cola – to consider a seemingly unlikely material for containing liquids: paper.
Product development teams at all four companies are part of a "pioneer community" brought together and coordinated by an aptly named startup Paboco, shorthand for "paper bottle company".
Together, they are working on prototypes of bio-based containers of varying shapes and sizes that use wood fiber, rather than glass or some form of fabric, to hold anything from lotions to carbonated beverages – and that is already a challenge.
"The paper bottle concept is still extremely early in its lifecycle, and so we will actively work within the community to advance the prototypes and overcome some of the hurdles we jointly discover", noted Stijn Franssen (right), senior engineering for packaging with Coca-Cola’s research and development team for Europe.
Coca-Cola’s work on the paper bottle is one of many alternative packaging approaches the company is considering and experimenting with as they work toward a goal of using 50 percent renewable or recyclable materials in all of their products by 2030; in fact, they have pledged to make all of their packaging recyclable by 2025.
Not only that but it seems that Paboco technology even offers unique capabilities toward differentiating, alternative shapes and details.
"A distinctive design, together with the correct functionality while contributing to a sustainable packaging future, that is what this innovation project is all about", Franssen said.
I spotted this on Laughing Squid only yesterday and although it is dated, I still want to share this! A ragtag band of Berlin street artists decided they have had enough of seeing the hateful swastika graffiti around the German capital – and decided to respond with love and humor. "We as street artists wanted to send the message: you're abusing graffiti", said Ibo Omari who initiated #Paintback, an empowering campaign that transforms the potent symbol of racist venom into amazing works of street art. "Graffiti's got nothing to do with racism – it's about bright colors and diverse backgrounds" – kindly check it out here:
The swastika is actually a talisman of good fortune since millennia – but we must also acknowledge that the Nazis had perverted it into a representation of hateful racism.
In the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being". The ideogram has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millennia.
In fact, the swastika is more European in origin than most people realize.
Archaeological finds have long demonstrated that the swastika is a very old device – and ancient examples are by no means limited to India.
A Hindu boy with a shaved head, and a giant vase at a Buddhist temple in Japan. Image credit: Alamy
Top left: Mosaic swastika in excavated Byzantine church in Shavei Tzion, Israel. Top right: A finding from the cemetery of Ancient Thera, 8th to 7th century BC. Archaeological Museum of Fira in Fira in Santorini, Greece. Images credit: CC BY-SA 3.0. Bottom: The swastika, the Phoenician sun symbol, on the Phoenician Craig-Narget stone in Wigtownshire in south-west Scotland. Image credit: Ancient Origins
It was used by the Ancient Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons and some of the oldest examples have been found in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans.
And at the beginning of the 20th Century there was a huge fad for the swastika as a benign good luck hieroglyph.
In his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? American graphic design writer Steven Heller shows how it was favored and then adopted in the West as an architectural motif, on advertising and product design.
Twentieth century fad: Fruit packaging, a Coca-Cola pendant, and a pack of cards, all from the US.
"Coca-Cola used it. Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. The Boy Scouts adopted it and the Girls' Club of America called their magazine Swastika. They would even send out swastika badges to their young readers as a prize for selling copies of the magazine", he says.
It was even used by American military units during World War One and it could be seen on RAF planes too as late as 1939.
Most of these wholesome uses came to a halt in the 1930s when the Nazis rose to power in Germany.
The Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th Century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans.
This idea was seized upon by anti-Semitic nationalist groups who appropriated the swastika as an Aryan insignia to boost a sense of ancient lineage for the Germanic people.
The black straight-armed hakenkreuz (hooked cross) on the distinctive white circle and red background of the Nazi flag would become the most hated symbol of the 20th Century, inextricably linked to the abominable atrocities and mass killings committed under Adolf Hitler's (right) Third Reich (or otherwise known as Nazi Germany). Historians estimate the total number of innocents murdered in Europe in the years leading up to 1945 by the Nazis during the Holocaust genocide to be 11 million. The victims encompassed six million Jews and 5 million others comprising gay people, priests, Romani gypsies, people with mental illnesses, people with physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.
The Dragon has already set foot in Malaysia. At Thean Hou temple, Carlsberg Malaysia introduced the specially created bottle-contructed fifteen feet “Ambient Dragon” – just in time for the Lunar New Year. Talk about being environment-friendly!
And this Dragon made entirely out of plastic kitchen utensils (e.g. spoons, knives, forks and cups glued together using a glue gun). This artwork is completely freestyle – there are no plans, no drafts and no blueprints. It takes approximately 80 hours to create this!
Liverpool hold the advantage and have a first Wembley appearance since 1996 in their sights after a Carling Cup semi-final first-leg victory at Manchester City.
Steven Gerrard's penalty in the thirteenth minute, awarded when Stefan Savic fouled Daniel Agger, condemned Manchester City to a second successive home defeat. There could have be an avalanche of goals instead of that one solitary goal because Liverpool forced a succession of outstanding early saves from Manchester City keeper Joe Hart.
On October 07, I wrote about Malaysia hiking up excise duties on tobacco products – as a way to finance a debt-ridden national economy. Usually, it is either tobacco or alcohol or worse, both product categories that will get this special treatment. So I did not bat an eyelid when I read this news on the Net from Russia today. Supposedly, the Russian Ministry of Finance is contemplating to increase the excise duty on beer by 200 percent, purportedly to bring in an extra 65 billion roubles ($2.25 billion) of revenue next year to plug the budget deficit of the recession-hit Russian economy. Obviously this has sparked real concern to Carlsberg that Joergen Rasmussen, chief executive of the Danish brewer himself had to flag that this brazen plan could cost the country 100,000 jobs and may even prompt the company to shutter factories. Carlsberg owns Baltika, and it is by far, the largest brewer in Russia with some 40 percent of the market. As a beer company, they would expect to be at the receiving end, and so tax hikes are pretty much expected. In the markets where this brewer operates, the average duty increase usually amounts to 5-10 percent, sometimes even 20 or 30 percent, but 200 percent is really exorbitantly steep.
Sometimes, I wonder what the world is coming to. Why are government bureaucrats such wet blankets that they target and penalize the one product that is probably the world’s best form of simple enjoyment? Yep, you got it, beer. Because if you ask me, a good beer is indeed, one of life’s greatest pleasures. There is an Egyptian proverb that I remember that says “The mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer”. How very true! There’s nothing like sipping (okay, some of you don’t sip, but quaff) ice-cold beer, whether in the company of friends or by yourself, whether in a pub, coffee-shop, or at home. And admittedly, Carlsberg is the beer many of us can identify with. What’s more, for us who are Liverpool fans, there is no other beer than Carlsberg! Honest, it is probably the world’s best beer for football occasions. So, I am now using Alan Tan's notebook and posting my take on my favorite beer, and at the same time, drinking ice-cold beer that can only be Carlsberg. My mind lights up. With Carlsberg, there is clarity, y’see. I recall a Homer Simpson quote: “I’m gonna drink lots of beer and stay out all night”. Cheers!
Liverpool have been sponsored by Carlsberg for 17 years but from next season, will have London-based Standard Chartered on their shirts – in a sponsorship deal reportedly worth £80m over four years, according to UK's The Independent and Guardian newspapers. Liverpool managing director Christian Purslow said that Standard Chartered's global status reflected Liverpool's ambition to be the best football club in the world.
I am sorry that Carlsberg’s relationship with Liverpool will end – but with Standard Chartered, we could potentially see Liverpool playing in Malaysia in the near future – considering that Carlsberg was an impediment all this while because it is a beer brand!
Gareth Bullock from Standard Chartered Bank, left, Liverpool ambassador Kenny Dalglish and Christian Purslow pose at Anfield. Photograph: Tim Hales/AP.
Shobana Thrumalingam, another of my lecturers has quit. Sigh… finding good teaching staff is already a real challenge, but keeping good teaching staff is an even bigger challenge! Life at HICT just gets tougher!
I am feeling a wee bit guilty. I am a Carlsberg drinker – by choice! Besides the fact that Carlsberg is a great beer, it is also because I support Liverpool. Why? Carlsberg is the shirt sponsor of Liverpool FC. So I must confess that last night, while I did crave for a Carlsberg … well, for a whole 6 seconds anyway… I still enjoyed my Guinness nonetheless…
But I know that many people are put off by their first taste of Guinness as the bitter, burnt flavor can take getting used to. Guinness is an acquired taste. I remembered my first drink of Guinness, and it tasted horrible. After that, I resisted the urge to drink it again – all the while preferring my beer. I recalled a Bentong friend, mixing Guinness and Anchor (those days, Anchor was a big beer brand) – to make it easier to drink, and gradually, I could drink the stout beer on its own. In fact, these days, I quite enjoy Guinness, particularly ice-cold Guinness. Actually, all it takes is to ignore that initial shock of bitterness from the first sip, but once you let the creamy goodness envelop your palate – the stout just flows smoothly down your parched throat and you can fully savor the full-bodied taste of Guinness. Well, at least, that’s what I experience anyway.
Okay, to assuage any residue of guilt feelings that I might still have as a result of my Guinness indulgence yesterday – I am posting two of my favorite Carlsberg commercials:
