Informationalization

Sending the Recipe 265

Taking the recipe Concept even Further 268

263

Enter code DITPDE for 15% off any Rosenfeld Media product directly
purchased from our site: http:Zrosenfeldmedia. com

P

roducing things is both expensive and resource-intensive in terms of material, time, attention, and money. It doesn’t matter much what the product is. Whatever can be done to reduce the use for these resources is important, but sometimes it’s possible to radi­cally reduce something to almost nothing if we rethink the problem and its context.

For example, while it doesn’t cost much to ship a single bottle of Coca-Cola around the world from the original bottling plant in Georgia, multiplied over the hundreds of billions of bot­tles that Coca-Cola sells each year, that’s a lot of financial and environmental impact—even at today’s artificially low shipping costs. Long ago, the Coca-Cola company realized that this would be cost-prohibitive for their product and began sending the recipe instead. Using the Coca-Cola recipe and local bottles and ingre­dients, they can radically reduce the cost of a bottle (or can) most anywhere in the world. In many cases, the ingredients other than water (such as sugar—or now corn syrup, vanilla, etc.) may need to be shipped from their points of origins. However, the amount of material is vastly reduced with this licensing model, and it has allowed Coca-Cola licensees to operate over 600 bottling plants around the world.

Whatever can be done to reduce the use for these resources is important, but sometimes it’s possible to radical­ly reduce something to almost noth­ing if we rethink the problem and its context.

Updated: October 1, 2015 — 10:55 pm