The Coca-Cola Company has announced that its bottle technology will now also be used by Heinz for its ketchup packaging. The bottle technology was launched in 2009 and uses a plastic sourced from sugarcane waste to replace 30 per cent of the plastic in bottles.

Heinz will introduce PlantBottled ketchup this summer across the US. That means that 120 million of its 20-ounce retail and foodservice bottles will now get the partly renewable packaging. These PlantBottles will even have a special label with environmental messages. Coke wants to invest more than $150 million in the PlantBottle technology. Their goal is to reach 100 per cent renewable and recyclable packaging as soon as they can.

Touchscreens all over Japan will be upgraded by the end of the year since new Coca-Cola vending machines will now feature a 46″ LCD touchscreen instead of buttons and knobs. The idea is to make purchasing drinks more fun while making the machines stand out from the crowd.

The integration of LCD panels will also allow advertisers to expand their reach and display maps of the area for tourists. So have a coke and a smile along with some advertising.

It’s hard enough keeping our gadgets charged with electricity, but now they are stealing our Coke and will soon leave us thirsty. Chinese designer Daizi Zheng has a cylindrical Nokia straight from the future that drinks Coca-Cola to stay juiced.

All you do is unscrew the top and pour the coke in. According to Daizi a single can of Coke could last longer than a lithium ion battery by three or four times. Though I’m not sure it helps the environment any. I recently heard somewhere that a single liter of coke takes something like 800 gallons of water to produce.

When it comes to soda, we need choices, not just regular and diet. We need mega-choice. It’s 2009, not the stoneage. That’s why Coke is showing off its new “Freestyle” soda fountain. This baby uses a touchscreen to allow you to choose one of over 100 flavors.

That’s right, over 100 flavor options. Not a one of them any healthier than what we have today. But the future is all about choice not health. Check out the video above to see how it all works. Turns out the future is just full of soda flavors. And that’s the way we like it.

As you may or may not know Japan is prone to many an earthquake. Japan’s major cities have an extended underground transportation system. So when a quake happens, people could be potentially trapped for long periods of time and suffer from dehydration.

That’s where these updated vending machines come into play. During an emergency, they’ll give out free drinks. But…Won’t people just turn into A-holes and start fighting over the drinks?

Coca Cola has more up its sleeve than just high fructose corn syrup and sugar. The company is coming out with a Windows-powered vending machine that will gather more statistics than any other vending machine on the market.

The machine will offer more types of drinks and flavors of Coke and will also keep track of what was sold and when, thus giving Coca-Cola some valuable intel with which to fight the cola wars. The vending machine can also alert the restaurant’s owner, and Coca-Cola, when one of the cartridges is almost empty.