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Heineken Picks a Winner for Sustainable Packaging Challenge
July 25, 2012 by Jacquelyn Ottman
The jury has spoken. The winner of the Heineken Sustainable Packaging Challenge — and a $10,000 prize is Germany’s Helmut Wittele. His “The Heineken $1000 bottle” idea turns beer pong into a recycling game.
Wittele proposed an innovative “Heineken-O-Mat” device designed to motivate consumers to return/recycle bottles. Increasing the return rate of bottles and cans has a very positive effect on their environmental impact. This idea has the potential to engage all parties needed to make a real difference for Heineken, consumers, retailers, NGO’s, and of course, the planet.
The Heineken Ideas Brewery represents the Dutch beer giant’s successful foray into open innovation. This first challenge, focused upon sustainable packaging ideas attempted to answer such questions as: How can we ensure that a larger amount of beer packaging will be re-used or recycled? What kind of new material would significantly improve the lifecycle of beer packaging? What are your ideas concerning packaging to maximize transport efficiency?
It yielded a surprising array of quality ideas from designers around the world, some of which were awarded prizes as “best co-creators” for enriching the ideas in a 2nd stage of the competition.
Link to www.IdeasBrewery.com/ideas to view the winning ideas. And check back there in August when the next challenge will be launched.
I was pleased to be part of the jury for this first challenge. Other international jurors included: Willem van Waesberghe, Heineken’s global research and development director; François-Xavier Mahot, Heineken’s Senior Global Innovation Director; LinYee Yuan, Managing Editor of Core77 (towing the line with me from a NYC video conference room), and Janne Kytannen, Industrial Design Creative Director of Freedom of Creation. It even prompted me to order a cold one during my next opportunity.
Link here to my original post describing the Sustainable Packaging Challenge’s launch.
Jacquelyn Ottman is principal and founder of New York City-based J. Ottman Consulting, expert advisers on green marketing to Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government labeling programs. The author of foor books, her latest isThe New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools, and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding (Berrett-Koehler, February 2011). For more information and to download a free chapter, link here.
Recent blog posts:
- Consumers Really Can Save the World
- Can Product-Sharing Sustain the Earth AND the Economy?
- What Green Consumer Polls Should Really Be Asking
Subscribe to Jacquie Ottman’s Green Marketing Blog. Link here.
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