Iconic white ribbon of Coca-Cola shows public where to recycle

Coca-Cola has made sustainability and recycling a big part of its corporate strategy. Now, a creative campaign in Europe nicely uses Coke’s iconic visual branding to help consumers recycle, too. Billboards from Publicis Italy, rolling out in several cities in Central and Eastern Europe, turn the beverage brand’s famous white ribbon—introduced to the Coke branding scheme in 1969—into an arm whose hand points to nearby recycling bins. Coca-Cola has done lots of creative things with the white ribbon. Ironically, the Publicis work comes at a time Coke has been moving away from the ribbon as a branding device, including stripping it from the product packaging entirely.