A recycled chair that looks cool, made from more than 100 bottles or cans

First, there was the Karl Lagerfeld ad for Diet Coke. It made sense since that's what the designer lives on, but the result looked disturbingly tacky. Then, there was a Diet Coke-themed nail polish range for nails inc., which looked better, but didn't make sense. Now, Coca Cola may have found the image-boosting product that combines both good thinking and aesthetics: a well-designed chair made from its recycled bottles and cans.

Working together with the Emeco design brand, the soft drink giant has succeeded in producing a new interpretation of its well-known Navy Chair (pioneered in the 1940s for the US navy), entirely made from recycled material.

Called the 111 Navy Chair, referring to the number of bottles it takes to produce one of them, this new product will go on sale come June and is expected to repurpose more than three million bottles each year. Kate Dwyer, the Coca-Cola Company's group director for worldwide licensing, even said this latest addition was another step in "our vision to recover and reuse all of our bottles and cans."

And Gregg Buchbinder, Emeco's chairman, added: "Although reengineering a core product is a significant investment for us, I was excited about the impact of reusing the PET from about three million plastic bottles a year. That's a lot of bottles and a lot of chairs."

Coca-Cola has previously turned its waste into shirts, bags, caps, and notebooks - but never was the impact of a new addition as high (and the result as nice-looking).

The 111 Navy Chair, available in the colors of red, snow, flint, grass, persimmon and charcoal, will launch in retail locations worldwide in June and can also be ordered by sending an email to coca-cola@emeco.net.

http://emecowithcoke.com