It has arrived. Ladies and gentlemen: the compostable water bottle has arrived. Earlier this month, Green Planet Bottle launched an organic, 100% plant-based bottle which is not only petroleum- and BPA-free, but it’s also carbon neutral. This is certainly a good business move: Green Planet is entering the $11 billion bottled water market that doesn’t seem to go away. But can bottled water really be “green,” or sustainable?
The company is targeting schools, corporate campuses, and hotels, and can be used to gain LEED certification. According to the press release that announced the launch, “Green Planet Bottling was formed to help its customers make positive and sustainable differences by making a product that is healthy for our bodies and our planet. Its vision is to become the premier bottler of waters/beverages in organic, sustainable packaging.”
This upsets me. According to a study conducted by the Pacific Institute, bottled water raises serious concerns about the energy and water resources required to produce bottles and deliver them to consumers. The process of bottling water produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, and it takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water. Transporting bottled water also requires millions in barrels of oil. And the list goes on…
Most people who know about environmental issues know that bottled water is unsustainable on many levels. Changing the way the bottle is made is not a sustainable answer to bottled water. A compostable bottled water is still bottled water. Even so, the Green Planet website claims it is a “category changer.” As a brand, they are reframing the controversy of bottled water and are positioning themselves as a sustainable alternative to old school bottled water. Their strategy, in my opinion, is the strategic version of greenwashing. The company is opportunistically capitalizing on people’s desire to be environmentally responsible (and buy compostable vs. plastic products), and is misleading the public about the true environmental sustainability of its product.
Other than promoting the bottle’s material, nowhere on the Green Planet Bottling website can one find information about the sustainability of the company. Is the production process sustainable? Do they use alternative sources of energy to manufacture the compostable bottle and then bottle the water? Do they use hybrid or electric vehicles to transport the bottles (or are they still using gas-guzzling trucks)? And what are they doing to teach consumers about water conservation and the larger global water crisis? Those answers are not available online—and that’s probably another strategic move.
A one-use, throwaway bottled water that says “Green Planet” on it makes me feel physically ill. One step forward, two steps back.
On the website, they say the problem with bottled water is that it is served in plastic and leaches chemicals. Talk about missing the point; pulling the fear card to sell a slightly differentiated product that has a similar environmental impact.
It’s “renewable”, but the corn sugar it’s made with is pretty much oil. They’ll “buy 100% percent back”, of course, but 90%+ will go to the landfill. PLA does not biodegrade outside of commercial composting facilities; it sit in the soil or bobs around in the ocean just like its plastic counterparts.
I’m mystified by the LEED claim, but I guess the plant-based bottle would count as “rapidly renewable” and fits into a “sustainable” purchasing plan for “ongoing consumables”. A minuscule addition, though, and a bit misleading.
Nayelli and Chris are pretty hard on Green Planet Bottling. The company web site made some decent arguments. Of course I agree that water, sold by the case in plastic bottles is the dumbest thing since sliced white bread wrapped in plastic but convenient, portable water containers are useful in certain situations. My preference is personally filled stainless steel, but I have Hetch Hetchy (don’t start) on tap.
The best models we have for a solution to corporate evil can be found in Joe Camel, Coca Cola and Ronald McDonald.
First, all of these products depend on marketing to children. We need to educate our children more effectively. Children become parents and they will educate their children. A substantial portion of what children learn comes from television, other media and other children. Corporate messages to children are akin to statutory rape. It needs to be stop. Corporations respond very well to law. Pass a law.
Second, all of these products harm their users and the environment. Cigarettes damage user health, threaten secondary inhaler health, release GHGs (okay, not very much), and all those darn filter tips to landfills, street drains, sewers, streams and rivers, beaches and oceans. We now tax cigarettes to defray some of the health costs they generate. Why not add a deposit for each filter tip – say 25 cents per filter cigarette. Bring 20 filter tips back and get $5. That will keep 95% of current filter tips off the streets because smokers start using cigarette holders or they watch where they put their butts. Filters that fall on the streets will get picked up quickly by people who need or want the money. The filters have no health benefit, of course. They represented a marketing ploy and they keep the tobacco out of the mouth.
When I was a child, Coca Cola was typically sold in those shapely 8 oz. bottles now in museums. They were heavy and sturdy. We used to pick them up along with other serving-size soft drink bottles to get a nickle back at the trading post. The deposit represented half the cost of original purchase. When bottles were replaced by steel cans the return system stopped until re-instituted by force of law. The law is the deposit law. This encouraged the switch to more expensive but lighter, more transportable and easily compacted aluminum.
The experience acquired through cigarette litigation and Coca Cola packaging, should be applied to McDonald’s. A deposit should be paid for all takeout restaurant packaging. It should be high enough that channels for return are demanded by consumers and provided by vendors. Litigation, if necessary, or taxation, preferably, should be brought to bear on purveyors of all consumer products that systematically produce adverse health effects. Such taxation should be high enough to remove such products from the market or provide for the full costs of mitigation – paying proportionally for health costs of obesity, diabetes, heart failure, stroke.
Applying all this to water bottles would result in a deposit per plastic or Green Planet bottle high enough to ensure collection in a systematic manner that would hopefully lead to sorting for optimal reprocessing. Petroleum based plastic bottles would be assessed for the health damage projected from plastic containers (specific to the chemistry of the brand). These new cost factors would tend to drive ll such products from the market but would offer the safer product some economic advantage.
We need to use scientific analysis, not depend on glib advertising, to make judgments about the complex choices we face in everyday life. The social impacts of those choices should be influenced, properly, by a system of sales or use taxes or deposits so that the social costs are properly billed and covered. In short, market economics will be harnessed to guide consumer choices on a full-cost basis.
In the case of Green Planet, don’t make the perfect answer the enemy of an improvement.
Someone has to pick up the dead birds around those people windmills
Understandably the industry hasnt fined tuned the process to be “Green” But do we cut this development off at the knees for not being environment friendly enough or do we support its direction.
It only takes the commitment of one company to invest some time and funding into its process improvement. On a global level it may take reeducating a generation on recycling and plastic industry developments but in reality its the ONLY direction this industry has to go in.
I agree with you. This is a company that is trying to do the right thing but it’s not really solving the bigger problems of production waste, travel, consumption of different resources. The bigger problem is we’re not holding each of us accountable to do the right thing and not use disposable bottles in the first place.
I do not understand. These people are trying to help. This argument focuses primarily on the big picture, and that’s not what Green Planet Bottling is attempting. They are trying to modify a pixel in the HD screen of destruction that ‘man’ has created. I do not believe that you have a good point, however true what you are saying may be. Trying is what is important! Every journey begins with a single step. Running will make you fall.