Coca-Cola’s sustainable design effort, known as e3, has led to a reduction in weight and improvement of impact resistance of the company’s iconic glass contour bottle, saving 89,000 metric tons of glass in 2006. That’s the carbon dioxide equivalent of planting more than 13,000 acres of trees, the company said. The initiative was detailed in Coca-Cola’s latest Environmental Performance report, which also said most of the company’s primary packaging is now returnable, bulk or made from commonly recycled materials like aluminum, glass and PET

People from the town of Collinsville, Ill., home to the world’s largest ketchup bottle, recently created an eight foot tall, four foot wide, 1,500 pound ketchup packet they hope will be awarded “world’s biggest” status by Guinness World Records. The town recruited the H.J. Heinz Company to sponsor the effort and donate 4,000 of its iconic glass ketchup bottles for people to use in helping to fill the packet. The final creation was sealed and displayed for a few days in Collinsville before being transported to Heinz HQ in Pittsburgh. No word on the larger-than-life packet’s shelf life.

No, it’s not an oxymoron but a description of a new brand of canned foods called Taste, which is setting out to retool the “outmoded” center store aisles of the grocery store. Premium canned offerings are a key strategy: there’s Maine lobster, Italian grilled eggplant and Lychee fruit from Thailand. Apparently, even foodies like convenience. The company is betting that its bold brand identity, with rich cobalt blue labels and minimalist copy, will go a long way to selling the exotic foodstuffs since, well, they’re all hidden inside the can.

A coffee-table book produced by Fossil catalogues hundreds of the brand’s tin designs from the past 17 years. The Texas-based watchmaker, now a public company, made its mark selling retro-styled watches in colorful vintage-inspired tins (the running joke: consumers buy the tins, and get a free watch inside!). A look through the tome should provide plenty of “tinspiration”, and should also prompt the question: Is my packaging coffee-table-book worthy?.