Vintage 1985 Coca Cola Recyclable Plastic Can 🥤 Pamphlet Die Cut Brochure Failed Product Soda History

Where Did Coca-Cola Test Its 1985 Plastic Can? 🥤 A Vintage Coca-Cola Recyclable Plastic Can Die-Cut Brochure, New Old Stock

Size: 3" x 5 3/4"

A little die-cut brochure shaped like a soda can, four can-shaped panels joined at the necks. The cover is Coke red with the white-and-brown ribbon wave, RECYCLABLE PLASTIC CAN on a brown diagonal band, big outlined Coke lettering and the Trade-mark (R). Fold it open and the other three panels answer eight questions, printed © 1985 The Coca-Cola Company. Every one I have is unused, never handed across a counter.

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. The die-cut follows 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, and the Dynamic Ribbon — that sweeping white-and-brown wave Coca-Cola had used on its packaging for years by then — curls down the right side, with the small "Trade-mark ®" notation tucked beside it. It is paper ephemera, not the plastic can itself, and its own printed copyright line and the trade-mark notes for "Coca-Cola" and "Coke" mark it as a piece The Coca-Cola Company produced.

🤔 What was Coca-Cola thinking?

Everybody remembers 1985 for New Coke, the new formula that lasted 79 days before the uproar brought the old one 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. Old-timers in the Coca-Cola collecting world still find it almost hard to believe that a company that size was running both experiments at once, in the same calendar year, with one becoming an infamous marketing case study and the other all but vanishing from public memory.

It wasn't a whim. A former Coca-Cola packaging engineer who managed the project laid it out in a sworn declaration in 2024: it started in 1983 under the code name PCAN, the idea was a can shaped just like the 12-ounce aluminum one, with a clear PET plastic body and an aluminum top, and part of the point was to stop being at the mercy of the price of aluminum. The engineering, as collectors have long pieced together and passed down, came from a packaging venture called Petainer - UPI's October 1985 report named Petainer Co. of Neuchatel, Switzerland, a joint venture of packaging firms working hand-in-hand with Coca-Cola. 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 — but a full-size plastic can, meant to replace the aluminum can at the individual 12-ounce level, was something else entirely. In the very same season that Coca-Cola was scrambling to walk back New Coke, the company was gearing up a second, entirely separate bet. New Coke was a formula gamble — a question of taste, which could at least 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.

📍 Columbus, Georgia

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. Shoppers in that one Georgia city had the 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 - and for a few months, the story goes, Columbus was the only place you could do that. UPI carried the announcement that month, and the engineer's declaration says Coca-Cola Bottling of Columbus filled and sold them in 1985 and 1986. It 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 testing ground for the future of soda packaging.

📋 Eight questions

The best part is reading what the company expected shoppers to ask. Under its very first heading, "1. Why a plastic can...?", the brochure prints its own five-point pitch: Attractive, appealing, fascinating transparency. Easy to hold, pack, carry, store, drink out of. Able to see the level of the drink remaining. See-through quality gives assurance of exact contents. Long-time familiarity with other plastic containers. Someone in Coca-Cola's marketing department sat down in 1985 and drafted answers to what they expected to hear across a checkout counter, and every one of them tells you how strange and new this object must have felt in someone's hand. Why a plastic can? Because, it says, since the early seventies plastic bottles had proved extremely popular, and by the end of this year more soft drinks would be brought home in plastic than in glass or metal - and you could see how much was left. Would it stay as cold? Honestly, no: it takes a little longer to chill and won't feel as cold to the touch, but it stays colder longer. Why the space at the top? Metal cans have it too, you just can't see it. It promises the carbonation would hold, the can would be as strong as what you were used to, the taste wouldn't change and the price would be comparable. And question eight, is it recyclable? "Yes. The plastic can is made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate)," the same stuff as the bottles, 20 percent of which were recycled in 1984, turned into fiberfill for ski jackets and sleeping bags, twine, carpet backing and clothing, with the metal top recycled on its own. 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 which points would make or break the product in a shopper's mind, and it answered every single one before it could be asked out loud in the aisle.

♻️ From test market to time capsule

The plastic can never made it past Columbus. Collector lore says the cans couldn't take the weight of cases stacked on top of them, warped, and cost too much to make, and the aluminum can went right on being the standard. The Atlanta factory, the Swiss packaging partnership, the four flavors on Columbus shelves — all of it quietly wound down. Because the can never advanced beyond that limited test market, promotional pieces like this one were only ever handed out in that narrow window. It's remembered, when it's remembered at all, as one of the great what-if footnotes of Coca-Cola's packaging history, eclipsed by its noisier cousin from the very same year. Funny thing is, every question in this brochure - will it hold the fizz, does it change the taste, is it really recyclable - is still being asked about every new bottle and can today. PET plastic went on to become one of the most recycled materials in the world, and 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. 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.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Frame it flat under glass alongside a vintage Coca-Cola can or bottle for a small "packaging history" vignette
• 🍾 Add it to a shelf of Coca-Cola advertising ephemera from the 1980s as a conversation-starting oddity
• 🏫 Use it as a teaching prop for marketing or business history discussions on product launches and packaging innovation
• 🍹 Set it out on a retro bar cart or soda-fountain-themed kitchen nook for guests to discover
• 📌 Pin it inside a shadow box with other 1985 Coca-Cola memorabilia to tell the New Coke / plastic can story side by side

🎁 Who Collects These

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. It's an especially fitting gift for anyone with ties to Columbus, Georgia, or Coca-Cola's home base of Atlanta.

🥤 About these

They fold out to about 11 1/4 inches across. A great one for a Coca-Cola collection next to a New Coke can, a Columbus or Atlanta wall, or anybody who loves the flops of corporate history. The supply is finite - Coca-Cola isn't printing these again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.