Eco Coke Bottle Design

Here's a bottle design (CLICK IT!) that has garnered an insane amount of attention on Digg as well as the overall blogospheric community:



The design is just a mockup, which means it won't actually go into production, but the fact that it was designed by a freshman student at CCS and has received so much attention thus far, is truly impressive.

It's worth noting however, that even though the way the product and it's features are presented (as well as the typography, photography, and layout involved in the process) is exceptional, the product design itself is not very practical.

There's a very clear reason for the way coke bottles and cans are designed the way they currently are.

I wish I had a link to prove this but I remember learning in my Calculus BC (oO0O0!) class in highschool that typical soda cans in the US are shaped to carry 12 fl oz of beverage with the least amount of aluminum necessary. The reason why cans aren't equal in width and height is because the tops and bottoms of cans are thicker and thus require more aluminum. The same is true about plastic bottles and plastic.

As for square shaped bottles, they would actually require more plastic to carry the same amount of volume as a cylindrical bottle. Here are the equations for the surface areas of rectangular prisms and cylinders if you wanna do the math out yourself.

Also, I don't think a thin rectangular-shaped bottle would be able to handle the stress of the carbonation inside coke, but then again I'm not an engineer (though I was once declared as one) so I wouldn't know. The only bottle I know of that's rectangular shaped is Fiji and last time I checked, that shit ain't carbonated. Please enlighten me if I'm wrong.

There's a million other reason out there too, I'm sure, as to why something like this would never go into production and why coke bottles are designed the way they are today (feel free to add your reasons in the comment section) but again, this is just a concept design (and a very good one from an aesthetic point of view) made by a freshman design student - there's no need to be any more of a bottle-design-nazi than I am already being.