Earlier this month, Naya, the Canadian bottled water company was awarded a Green Packaging Award for making its bottles from 100% post -consumer recycled plastic, also called rPET (recycled polyethylene terephtalate).
It is being hailed by many as a great step forward for waste reduction, cutting CO2 emissions and encouraging innovation in packaging. Naya are the first bottled water company in the world to use this type of technology.
Although it all sounds peachy keen and ‘innovative’ and ‘sustainable’ and whatever buzz word you want to use, the issue isn’t the packaging, its the act itself. Bottling water doesn’t make sense, especially given how labour and resource intensive recycling is, combined with perfectly clean, tap water readily available in Canada, and many developed countries in the world. Even after Dasani revealed its water is purified tap water people didn’t seem to bat an eyelid. Apparently, 25% of all bottled water is from a tap. This is something that has been so well documented and there’s a growing movement to boycott bottled water.
I don’t think I’ll ever really understand why the developed world, with high standards of water treatment, would ever need bottled water.
(Image courtesy of James Chang)