Message In a Bottle of Coke: A modern twist on a timeless gesture of connection and sustainability

"Message in a Bottle of Coke" is a self-initiated concept developed as a speculative brand experience and pitched to Coca-Cola. The project reimagines the iconic act of sending a message in a bottle — not as a romantic fantasy lost at sea, but as a design-led intervention within Coca-Cola’s global recycling ecosystem.

By combining emotional storytelling with sustainable behavior, the concept explores how a recycled Coke bottle could become a vessel not just for materials — but for moments of human connection.

Traditionally, a message in a bottle carried mystery, hope, or love across vast oceans — a poetic act of trust in the unknown. In this proposal, the metaphor is reinterpreted for a circular, connected world: What if a Coca-Cola bottle could carry a stranger’s story, a compliment, or a wish — as part of its second life through recycling?

In a world full of throwaway interactions and single-use objects, this project asks: What if we gave things — and people — a second chance to be meaningful? It’s about sustainability, yes, but also about surprise, emotion, and small moments of wonder shared between strangers.

Experience Flow

Write a Message
Through a vending machine interface or Coca-Cola app, users write a short message — anything from a kind thought to a secret or a challenge.
Message Meets Bottle
Each message is printed or encoded via QR and paired with a clean, recycled bottle — one that’s about to go back into distribution.
Surprise & Discovery
A new customer buys a Coke and finds a surprise message — creating a small emotional encounter with someone they’ll never meet.
Optional Response Loop
Users can scan the code to leave a message back or track where their bottle ended up, turning the experience into a shared digital trail.

Sustainability by Design

Too often, sustainability is framed through obligation — a call to “do better,” “use less,” or “clean up.” While important, this framing can feel guilt-driven and transactional. In Message in a Bottle of Coke, the goal was to flip that script.
Instead of asking people to recycle as an act of responsibility, the project invited them to recycle as an act of emotional generosity. A Coke bottle becomes more than waste to be managed — it becomes a vessel of human warmth, surprise, and storytelling.
By embedding a personal message into a recycled bottle, users become part of something larger than themselves:
- They don’t just reuse — they repurpose with meaning.
- They don’t just consume — they connect.
- And they don’t just follow sustainability guidelines — they participate in a shared cultural moment.
The experience transforms recycling from a chore into a story — one that’s human, playful, and memorable.
This is sustainability by design: not driven by rules or warnings, but by emotion, delight, and imagination