Something good coming out of the World Wildelife Fund’s infamous chumminess with big corporations? Who knew?

By **Russ Baker**

By arrangement with WhoWhatWhy.Com.

We’ve got mixed feelings about the World Wildlife Fund, which has tended toward excessive coziness with big corporations. But sometimes, something good comes out of that chumminess. For example, this:

Over in the Philippines, Coca-Cola and the WWF have teamed up to create a billboard that actually absorbs pollution. The 60-by-60-foot billboard is covered in Fukien tea plants. These bonsai trees suck up as much as 13 pounds of carbon dioxide each in a single year. Altogether, one billboard absorbs nearly 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to the botanist Anthony Gao.

The overall billboard is green too. The bonsais are held in 3,600 pots fashioned out of old coke bottles. The plants grow out, sideways. According to Adweek, the potting mixture comes from organic fertilizers and industrial byproducts.

No explanation of why this happened first in the Philippines, or when we might expect Coke culture to begin soaking up the L.A. smog.

Anyway, we judge this way cool, and look forward to seeing whether the perennially competitive Pepsi will post billboards with twice the positive impact.

And by the way, we still hate billboards and crass consumerism.

Have a nice day.

Copyright 2011 Russ Baker

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By arrangement with WhoWhatWhy.Com.

Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter and the founder and editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhy.

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