Will Power: From Black Eyed Peas to Recycling Innovator

By Lisa Palmer for Ensia

The co-founder of the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas is inspiring brands to design and innovate with recycled materials.

Will.i.am was sweating. You couldn't see it. But he was sweating on the inside.

"It's intimidating, you know, to be in front of like all the top Coke execs," the founder of the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas said recently at Fortune's Brainstorm GREEN in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

Will.i.am was describing the presentation he gave to the Coca-Cola Company that challenged the company and its executives to better convey sustainability. He had been searching for a way to turn the word "Coke" into a verb to create an initiative toward that end. ("And if you don't believe that verbs are important for companies to become, you should Google it," the rapper said.) He eventually found the solution by reworking the letters to form "Ekoc," then adding sustainability concepts to the new word. So: Eko-cycle, Eko-consumption, Eko-credibility, Eko-consciousness.

The concept stuck.

In July 2011, Coca-Cola and will.i.am launched the brand initiative called EKOCYCLE, which inspires existing brands to create products made from recycled materials.

A combination of events led will.i.am to the EKOCYCLE idea. First, the artist says, he became weary of being approached for campaigns and endorsements that didn't resonate. "You have a hot song on, you're traveling, and, 'Yo, we want you to do this one campaign for us. We're going to give you a certain amount of money to endorse our thing, hold our product like this,' and I just got tired of that," he said in an interview after the Brainstorm Green event. "They are always coming after us. This time I am going to go after them around this issue. We'll see who cares and who doesn't."

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Ensia is a magazine and event series showcasing environmental solutions in action. Powered by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, Ensia reaches across disciplines, ideologies, sectors and continents to connect people who can change the world with the ideas, information and inspiration they need to do so.