BottleBank.com

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What is BottleBank?

This site is called "BottleBank.com" because I was looking for a name that reflected my idea of putting a photographic archive of Coca-Cola bottles and other items on the Internet.

Over in my country of birth, Great Britain, the term "BottleBank" is used to denote a recycling facility where people can deposit empty cans and bottles for subsequent recycling. Environmental friendliness is clearly a concern for everyone consuming packaged goods such as Coca-Cola. Certain packages are easier to recycle than others- metals are typically easier to recover than plastics for example. However, because to collectors, the value of what is on the package far exceeds the value of the content or the packaging materials themselves, and because packages (open or unopened) are retained rather than recycled, the conventional economics of recycling are not really applicable to collectors.

The reference to "Bank" could also be linked to the increasing value of some Coca-Cola collectibles- although this is not the central motivation for collecting for a lot of collectors. To them, the community aspects of trading are just as or more important. For the first five years that I collected Coca-Cola items, all of my friends laughed at me, for the past five years, I have been laughing at them. Any increase in value has surprised me and was never a central reason for collecting. Whatever your motivation for consuming or collecting Coca-Cola, please enjoy your relationship with Coca-Cola responsibly.