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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
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Pull open an old kitchen drawer in certain corners of the South and you might still find one of these tucked behind the coupons and church bulletins — a little die-cut piece of cardstock, shaped just like a soda can, that was trying its best to convince someone's grandmother that plastic could hold a Coke just as well as metal. It's a strange, wonderful little survivor of a moment when the most famous brand on Earth was willing to bet on an idea that, in hindsight, never had much of a chance. If you know your Coca-Cola history, 1985 rings a bell for one reason — New Coke, the reformulation that lasted all of 79 days before public outcry sent the original formula rushing back as "Coca-Cola Classic." What almost nobody remembers is that in that very same wild year, Coca-Cola was quietly running a second, far quieter experiment: trying to put its soft drinks into a see-through plastic can. This brochure is the paper proof that it happened.
This is an original Coca-Cola "Recyclable Plastic Can" promotional brochure, produced by The Coca-Cola Company and dated 1985 by its own printed copyright line. It's die-cut to the silhouette of a soda can — the top notched in at the shoulders, the bottom rounded off — so that unfolded, it reads almost like a paper stand-in for the can it was promoting.
The front panel is a bold piece of mid-1980s advertising art: a diagonal banner in dark brown reading "RECYCLABLE PLASTIC CAN" cuts across the top in white block lettering, while below it the iconic Coke script sprawls in cream-white outlined lettering, laid over the brand's signature red field.
The Dynamic Ribbon — that sweeping white-and-brown wave that Coca-Cola had used on its packaging for years by this point — curls down the right side of the panel, with the small "Trade-mark ®" notation tucked beside it. Unfold the brochure and the same red, cream, dark brown, gray, and black palette carries through a run of printed panels laid out in a numbered question-and-answer format, walking the reader through everything a shopper might wonder about this brand-new kind of can.
It is offered here as new old stock (NOS) — an unused survivor of a promotional print run that never got the chance to become an everyday object.
By the early 1980s, plastic wasn't a stranger to the soft drink aisle — the 2-liter PET bottle had already become a fixture in American refrigerators, and Coca-Cola's own brochure leans on that familiarity, opening its very first question with the plain observation that plastic bottles had been "extremely popular with consumers" since the early seventies. But a full-size plastic can, meant to replace the aluminum can at the individual, 12-ounce level, was something else entirely — nothing like it had ever been sold to American soda drinkers before.
The engineering behind it, as collectors have long pieced together and passed down, came from a company called Petainer Development Company — a joint venture of packaging firms based in Switzerland, working hand-in-hand with Coca-Cola to bring the idea to market. This wasn't a timid toe-dip. Petainer was reportedly building an entire production facility in Atlanta to manufacture these cans at scale if the test succeeded, with machinery installation underway and a completion target of December 1985. In other words, in the very same season that Coca-Cola was scrambling to walk back New Coke and rush Coca-Cola Classic back onto shelves, the company was also gearing up a second, entirely separate bet — one on packaging rather than formula. Old-timers in the Coca-Cola collecting world still find it almost hard to believe that a corporation of that size was running both experiments at once, in the same calendar year, with one becoming an infamous case study in marketing and the other all but vanishing from public memory.
That's really what makes this piece so interesting to collectors of Coca-Cola history: New Coke was a formula gamble — a question of taste, which is a matter of opinion and could at least theoretically be reversed with an apology and a relaunch. The plastic can was an engineering gamble — a question of physics, chemistry, and consumer habit, and those are much harder things to walk back once a factory is half-built and cans are already sitting on grocery shelves.
Starting in October of 1985, the story goes, selected food stores around Columbus began stocking the clear plastic can filled with Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke, and Sprite — meaning shoppers in that one Georgia city had the rare experience of picking up a soda that looked and felt like nothing else in the cooler, in flavors spanning the whole Coca-Cola lineup of the moment. No other soft drink brand in the country had ever been sold to the public in a plastic can before. For a few months, Columbus, Georgia was the only place on Earth where you could do that.
It's the kind of detail that never made the history books the way New Coke did, but it lived on in local memory and in the quiet corners of the collector world — the story of a Georgia grocery aisle that briefly became a national testing ground for the future of soda packaging, hiding in plain sight in the shadow of a much louder headline.
What makes this particular brochure so valuable as a piece of history isn't just that it survived — it's that it records, in the company's own words, exactly what Coca-Cola anticipated shoppers would worry about. Someone in Coca-Cola's marketing department sat down in 1985 and drafted answers to the eight questions they expected to hear across a checkout counter, and every one of those questions tells you something about how strange and new this object must have felt in someone's hand.
Reading through it now, what jumps out is how squarely the brochure zeroes in on carbonation retention and cold-holding — the two things that, engineers and collectors alike have long suspected, were the real Achilles' heel of a plastic can trying to do a metal can's job. The company clearly knew exactly which questions would make or break the product in a shopper's mind, and it answered every single one before the question could even be asked out loud in the aisle.
The plastic can never made it out of that test-market season. The Atlanta factory, the Swiss packaging partnership, the four flavors on Columbus shelves — all of it quietly wound down, and the aluminum can went right on being the standard it remains today. It's remembered, when it's remembered at all, as one of the great "what if" footnotes of Coca-Cola's packaging history — completely eclipsed by its noisier, more infamous cousin from the very same year.
But the idea the brochure was defending didn't disappear so much as it went underground for a few decades. PET plastic went on to become one of the most recycled materials in the world, and the same questions this pamphlet answers in 1985 — will it hold carbonation, is it really recyclable, does it change the taste — are the very same questions packaging engineers and environmental advocates are still asking today about every new can, bottle, and pouch that hits the shelf. That's a big part of why this little piece of ephemera carries more weight than its size suggests: it's a snapshot of a Fortune 500 company trying, and for a season failing, to get ahead of a packaging question the whole beverage industry is still wrestling with decades later.
For collectors, that combination — real corporate history, a documented but short-lived test market, and a design tied directly to one of the most talked-about brand-history years Coca-Cola ever had — is what gives this brochure its pull. It's not simply an old piece of advertising paper; it's a primary-source record of a decision Coca-Cola made and then quietly reversed, preserved in the company's own printed words.
This piece tends to find its way into the hands of dedicated Coca-Cola collectors chasing the corners of brand history that never made it into the mainstream story — the ones who already own the classic bottles and trays and want the deeper cuts. It also draws in packaging and industrial design historians who study PET's rise, advertising ephemera collectors who prize die-cut and shaped pieces for their display appeal, and anyone with a soft spot for the well-documented "flops" of American corporate history — the New Coke crowd who discover, often for the first time, that 1985 handed Coca-Cola a second, quieter experiment happening at the very same time. It's an especially fitting gift for anyone with ties to Columbus, Georgia, or Coca-Cola's home base of Atlanta.
It's an original Coca-Cola promotional brochure, die-cut into the shape of a soda can, printed to answer consumer questions about the company's experimental recyclable plastic can. It is paper/cardstock ephemera, not the plastic can itself.
Yes — it carries The Coca-Cola Company's own printed copyright line and trademark notations for "Coca-Cola" and "Coke," identifying it as a piece the company itself produced.
It carries a printed copyright date placing it in 1985, the same year Coca-Cola tested its short-lived plastic can packaging.
Because the plastic can it promotes never advanced beyond a limited test market, promotional pieces like this were only ever distributed in that narrow window — making surviving, unused copies a scarce category within Coca-Cola advertising ephemera.
It's offered as new old stock (NOS) — genuine unused printed inventory from the original run, never distributed or handled at store level.
Both were Coca-Cola experiments running in the same year — New Coke a change to the drink's formula, and this plastic can a change to its packaging. New Coke became famous; the plastic can quietly faded, which is exactly why this surviving brochure is such an unusual find today.
The brochure states the plastic can was made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the same recyclable material used in plastic soft drink bottles of the era.
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