Four More Climb Aboard the Coca-Cola-Will.i.am Ekocycle

Four additional brands are joining the Coca-Cola Company and the musician Will.i.am in an environmental initiative called Ekocycle, which seeks to develop creative ways of recycling plastic beverage bottles.

The brands are Case-Mate, a line of cases for smartphones; Levi's jeans, sold by Levi Strauss & Company; MCM, the high-end handbags, luggage and leather goods; and RVCA, the line of apparel like board shorts for action sports.

The four brands join the two that were in on the start of Ekocycle back in July: the Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones and New Era caps.

The four additional brands were announced at an event in Manhattan on Wednesday night that was designed to be ecologically correct. For instance, in place of gift bags, a donation was made to Keep New York City Beautiful, an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful.

“For us, this is Coca-Cola putting the consumer at the center of the recycling movement and taking the recycling movement eve n further,” Bea Perez, vice president and chief sustainability officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said in an interview before the event.

The concept is to “make it easy for consumers to be part of the movement by taking actions they would anyway,” Ms. Perez said, like shopping and buying products.

Ekocycle is among numerous efforts to create new uses for recycled materials as a way to encourage consumers to recycle, manufacturers to buy those materials and municipalities to begin or expand recycling programs.

The Coca-Cola Company has long encouraged consumers to recycle the bottles and cans in which it sells sodas and other beverages. There have, for instance, been advertising campaigns devoted to the subject.

Ekocycle, however, is meant to demonstrate to consumers that recycling is not some abstract process but rather has practical, tangible aspects.

The company's added attention to recycling is also “part of reaching that younger gener ation,” Ms. Perez said, that cares about the environment.

That dovetails with “a core goal of Coca-Cola,” she added, which is “to recruit teens.”

Ekocycle was featured in a speech made on Oct. 12 at the 2012 annual conference of the Association of National Marketers by Alison E. Lewis, senior vice president of marketing for North America at the Coca-Cola Company.

Ms. Lewis described Ekocycle as part of efforts to refresh the Coca-Cola brand that began in 2005.

To promote the four additional brands joining Ekocycle, Ms. Perez said, there will be commercials on networks like BET and NBA TV; content in social media like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter; and search engine marketing on Bing, Google and Yahoo.