Dive Brief:
- OR-based EartH2o, a bottled water company, and a St. Helens, OR-based recycling facility Orpet, announced a partnership to recycle used drink containers into single-serve, BPA-free water bottles sourced from Orpet’s recycling plant.
- EartH2o said it is the first bottled water company in the U.S. to use recycled PET as part of a closed-loop system.
- EartH2o was one of the first bottled water companies to use recycled PET in its bottles.
Dive Insight:
Orpet obtains beverage containers from recycling centers in Oregon. Materials are cleaned then transformed into flakes. The plastic is delivered to a recycler, Peninsula Plastics Recycling, where the flakes are ground into resin, converted into pellets and sent to EartH2o where it is converted into single-serve water bottles.
EartH2o adopted a number of sustainable initiatives as part of its operations. In 2011, the company stopped using cardboard packaging of its bottles, which saves over 350,000 pounds of the material annually. The business plans to manufacture bottle caps later this year, in an effort to increase sustainability further.
