Bottled drinks companies under pressure to boost recycling rates

By Cahal Milmo

Published: 18 September 2007

 

A transatlantic backlash against soaring use of plastic bottles has forced the world’s two leading drinks manufacturers to pledge dramatically to improve their recycling rates amid growing public concern at the environmental impact of bottled drinks.

Figures released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) show that sales of mineral water in Britain reached 965 million litres last year, an increase of nearly a third since 2001. Industry studies put the value of the bottled water market in the UK at £1.68bn. Sales in America have more than doubled in a decade to £5.4bn a year.

But there are growing signs that the major beverage companies are being forced to rethink their sales strategy amid a consumer-led wave of action by a number of public bodies – including Liverpool City Council and Defra – to ban bottled water and dispensers in their buildings while highlighting the ecological cost of using mineral water in plastic containers.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which between them account for 55 per cent of the global soft drinks and mineral water market, have vowed to overhaul their operations to recover and recycle the billions of plastic containers used to sell their products worldwide.

Buoyed by this success, campaigners are calling for an EU-wide increase in compulsory plastic recycling targets for drinks manufacturers. In America, a campaign has been launched to lobby Congress to invest heavily in the public water system to cut down on bottled water use.

Global bottled water consumption now stands at 180 billion litres a year, up from 78 billion litres a decade ago. In the US, demand has risen by nearly four billion litres since 2004, to 31 billion litres last year.

Chief executives at drinks companies are concerned that the campaign by consumers and governments to curtail bottled water consumption will cut sales in the multibillion-pound industry, which has boosted profits significantly for companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé as demand for healthier drinks increases.

Coca-Cola announced last week that it intended to recycle all its plastic bottles in the US within five years. A £30m recycling plant will be built in South Carolina with a capacity to handle two billion bottles a year with similar facilities planned for Austria, Mexico and the Philippines. Sandy Douglas, the head of Coca-Cola’s US operations, said: “The long-term sustainability of our business depends on our ability to ensure the sustainability of our packaging.” PepsiCo, which owns the Aquafina brand and is the second-largest bottled water producer after Nestlé, has vowed to improve its recycling performance. Indra Nooyi, the company’s chief executive, said the company needed to “do more” to recycle plastic containers.

Environmentalists argue the companies are reacting to growing unease at the expansion of the bottled drinks industry. Of the 13 billion plastic bottles bought in the UK last year, just 2.7 billion were recycled. It is estimated that it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil a year to produce all the plastic bottles required worldwide.

Liverpool City Council said it will save £48,000 a year by switching to tap water in all its buildings while San Francisco has banned city departments from buying bottled water dispensers and pledged to phase out large dispensers by the end of the year. In New York, the city authorities have run an advertising campaign encouraging the use of tap water.

Sustain, a UK-based campaigning group focusing on food and drink, said it was up to governments and institutions to set an example to consumers. Jeanette Longfield, the charity’s co-ordinator, said: “If public bodies are using taxpayers’ money to buy bottled water then they are not in a position to preach to consumers about changing their habits.”

Under the EU’s packaging directive, the current target for 20 per cent of all plastics to be recycled by producers will expire next year and campaigners say a more stringent target is vital. Michael Warhurst, waste and resources campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “There should be a push for that target to be set at 100 per cent. The directive means there is a well-understood structure in place to compel manufacturers to recycle more plastic than they currently do.”

From: The Independent.

How to clean up the slums – cook on garbage

By Barry Moody

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Entering Nairobi’s fetid slums the senses are first assaulted by a gagging stench and the sight of garbage everywhere, some even hanging from trees or smoldering in acrid fires.

The city government does not recognize the “informal settlements” where more than 60 percent of the population live, so no services are provided and no garbage collected.

The result is frighteningly unsanitary conditions.

Rubbish, “flying toilets” — excrement in plastic bags — and even aborted fetuses pile up in dumps along the muddy tracks or find their way into the rivers, where children play along the banks.

Garbage pollutes the air and seeps into ground water, or is picked over by pigs and other farm animals, its toxins entering the food chain and causing intestinal diseases.

Now a “community cooker” project in Africa’s biggest slum, Kibera, offers a way not only of getting rid of garbage, but of creating work for unemployed youths, and providing hot water and cooking facilities.

The people developing the project, a Nairobi architectural practice, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and a Kenyan non-governmental organization, hope it can be a prototype for cookers all over Africa.

The cooker, dreamed up by Kenyan architect Jim Archer, has taken eight years to develop and is still overcoming design problems.

“My thinking was how do we get rid of the rubbish and … how can we induce people to pick it up. Then I thought, well if we can convert it to heat on which people can cook…”

Industrial incinerators from Europe would cost $50 million. “This was way out of the realms of reality … and it wouldn’t give anything back,” Archer said.

He set out to design and find financing for a simple, labor intensive device with a minimum of moving parts that would be easy to repair and require no imported technology.

Archer consulted engineering companies in Britain.

“They just couldn’t understand simplicity. They could computer control it. They could mechanically handle the rubbish. But we want this to be labor intensive because there are so many people with no jobs.”

FIREBOX FRANCIS

Then Archer found brass foundry worker Francis Gwehonah, nicknamed “Firebox” because of his remarkable self-taught skill at furnace building.

“It is a talent in me. I haven’t gone through any kind of training,” says Gwehonah.

First attempts to burn the rubbish produced choking smoke and soot that brought complaints from Kibera residents that the cooker caused more pollution than it eliminated.

By trial and error Gwehonah found that if he superheated a steel plate in the cooker he could ignite discarded sump oil, another pollutant.

By vaporizing droplets of water to split off the oxygen and mixing it with the burning oil, he has pushed up the temperature to more than 600 degrees centigrade and is working to get it even higher to destroy all the toxins in the smoke. 

The scheme, run by a community group in Kibera’s Laini Saba area, where 50,000 people live, has more benefits than burning garbage.

Local youth workers who go door to door collecting rubbish — for which they are paid a small fee by slum dwellers — can exchange it for cooking time or hot washing water.

John Githinji, from the 40-strong youth group that collects the rubbish, stoked the furnace with sweat pouring from his face. “People throw rubbish on the ground and it causes sickness,” he grunted through the smoke.

Water will also be boiled for drinking and eventually the cooker will be used for baking bread and cakes to sell.

“The trash has started to help us a bit after the cooker came. There are less diseases like diarrhea and the environment has improved. … I think burning the rubbish will bring good health to this community,” said Patricia Ndunge as she fried onions on the cooker.

About 60 percent of the slum rubbish can be burned if the temperature is high enough. Much of the rest can be sold to recycling companies.

The project, funded by Archer and his business partner, UNEP and a local paints company, has cost around $150,000 to develop, but once the prototype is perfected, future cookers should cost less than $10,000.

Kenya’s big supermarket chain Nakumatt has pledged to fund at least 20 more slum cookers and Archer believes they can eventually be adapted to distil dirty water, fire pottery kilns and operate scrap metal foundries.

“Most people dump in rivers and roadsides, on top of roofs, or on railway sidings. Finally there is somewhere we can take our waste, ” said Celine Achieng of the Umande Trust NGO working in Kibera, where more than 800,000 people live.

“This will solve a lot of problems. We are trying to change perceptions to persuade people not to take their waste to the river.”

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL3076674020070830?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&pageNumber=1

Sony to offer free nationwide recycling

Trendwatch

By Humphrey Cheung

Friday, August 17, 2007 17:35

Recommend article:  New York (NY) – You’ll soon be able to safely throw away your old and unwanted Sony gear through the company’s new recycling program.  The “Take Back Recycling” program will start on Sept 15 and will let consumers drop off electronics at 75 locations throughout the United States. The drop off locations will be run in conjunction with WM Recycle and consumers can also opt to mail in their gear.  Sony says it wants to double the number of locations within a year – this will include a location in every state. Consumers can drop off electronics from other companies, but they will be charged a fee.

Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33448/117/

On the anti-bottled-water bandwagon

Filter and container makers are capitalizing on the latest green trend.

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 14, 2007

Plastic water bottles have been getting such a bad rap that people have started paying attention, which means that corporate America has started cashing in.

The company that makes Brita water filters teamed up Monday with Nalgene, a manufacturer of reusable beverage containers, to launch the FilterForGood campaign, aimed at weaning people off throwaway bottles.

“Refilling our own personal water bottle with filtered water from the tap requires far less energy and wastes almost no resources relative to bottled water,” said Josh Dorfman, a spokesman for the campaign and the author of “The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living.”

He called it “an easy thing to accomplish with potentially big results” — for the environment and, though he didn’t mention it, for sales of Brita filters and Nalgene bottles.

Brita, which is owned by Oakland-based Clorox Co., and Nalgene, a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of Waltham, Mass., are two companies piggybacking on Americans’ plastic-water-bottle remorse. More than 1.5 million barrels of petroleum go into the production of the 38 billion plastic water bottles Americans toss every year.

It was smart marketing that persuaded people that they needed to buy their own personal disposable carriers of gourmet water in the first place, and smart marketing that the anti-plastic forces used to educate the country about the evils of the trend.

Now, companies that sell bottled water, the bottles themselves and other water-related products are taking the environmentalists’ lead by touting their Earth-friendliness.

“There’s a race to trumpet that kind of thing,” said Jeffrey Klineman, an editor at BevNet.com.

And it seems to work. Sigg USA, which promotes its reusable aluminum bottles as eco-friendly and stylish — “It’s not what you drink,” the Sigg slogan goes, “it’s what you drink it in” — has seen sales shoot up 200% in the last three months, said Steve Wasik, the company’s general manager.

Siggs are carried in Whole Foods and REI stores, among others; a 20-ouncer goes for about $20. Musical acts like the Fray and Jack Johnson sell them at their concerts. At New York Fashion Week in September, runway models and stylists working for seven designers will carry Siggs filled with tap water under a deal inked with Aveda, a unit of Estee Lauder Cos. that is sponsoring the enterprise.

“Using a Sigg bottle is a smart and simple way to say you care about the environment,” Wasik said.

Sigg rival Nalgene would no doubt beg to differ, and certainly Brita would add that the water should be strained through one of its charcoal filters.

The Brita-Nalgene website launched Monday, www.filterforgood.com, makes several key claims for the green-minded, including that one Brita pitcher filter (a four-pack sells at Target for less than $20) can replace as many as 300 plastic bottles “so you can get great-tasting water without so much waste. Talk about refreshing.”

On the site, people can pledge to reduce their throwaway-bottle consumption. And until Dec. 31 they can buy a FilterForGood refillable bottle (made by Nalgene, of course) for $10, with a donation of as much as $4 made to the Blue Planet Run Foundation, a nonprofit working to provide safe drinking water to 200 million people by 2027.

The companies that sell water in containers not intended for refilling do not plan to be casualties of the bottle wars.

Nestle, which owns such brands as Arrowhead, Poland Spring and Ice Mountain, is rolling out a lightweight bottle that uses 30% less plastic than the current model and sports a paper-saving label that is 30% smaller. The company is investigating other environmentally friendly packaging alternatives, a spokeswoman said.

Coca-Cola Co. has redesigned bottles for its Dasani brand to reduce the use of raw materials by 30% and introduced a cap that can be recycled. Pepsi Co.’s Aquafina — which under pressure from consumer groups recently began to acknowledge on its bottles that the water inside originates from the tap — has reduced the weight of its plastic packaging by 40% in the last five years.

“Everyone really wants to be green now,” said David Zutler, chief executive and founder of Biota, a Colorado company that in 2004 opened a factory that makes water bottles out of plastic manufactured from corn. (Biota bottles aren’t sold in stores now; the company is in a legal dispute with an investor and has stopped manufacturing but plans to begin again soon.)

The FilterForGood campaign could be a huge success, but Klineman of BevNet.com doesn’t think Americans will ever give up the convenience of the throwaway bottle.

“People are not going to stop drinking bottled water,” he said. “The question is, what is the industry response going to be?”

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-water14aug14,1,6295983.story?coll=la-headlines-business&ctrack=1&cset=true

Ten readers’ ways to cut your carbon footprint

We’ve brought you ten ways to cut your carbon footprint at home and ten ways to cut your carbon footprint at work, now we feature ten ideas from readers of The Independent to help you lead a greener, cleaner, less polluting and less carbon-heavy lifestyle

Published: 09 August 2007

 

Reduce your carbon footprint by taking your holidays in the UK

1 Buy local produce

There are many reasons for buying local. Often it’s just nice to know where your food comes from, but most of the time there’s a reduction in your carbon footprint too. This is because, in a world of globalised food production, most food travels a long distance, releasing CO2 all the way.

One estimate concluded that feeding each of us for a year requires transporting the equivalent of a 12-tonne container load of food for more than a 100km. The trucks involved emit 170kg of CO2 in Britain and another 150kg abroad. A further 30kg comes from air-freighting your perishables, such as vegetables, fruit and fish. Organic food, incidentally, is no better. Twice as much organic food is imported as domestically produced, or as much as three quarters by some estimates.

Most of these transport emissions can be eliminated by buying local produce. Supermarkets are increasingly good at labelling this clearly, and farmers’ markets usually sell nothing else. There are more than 500 farmers’ markets in the UK, and more are starting up all the time. Check where your nearest is by going to www.farmersmarkets.net.

To be doubly sure of having a low carbon footprint, it’s a good idea to make a point of buying produce when it’s in season. That way, you avoid the CO2 emissions from heating greenhouses, which can sometimes be as great as air-freighting from foreign lands. For a guide to what’s in season when, see www.thefoody.com/basic.

2 Reduce your meat consumption

The carbon footprint from producing animal protein is typically eight times greater than that from vegetable protein. Animals are not very efficient protein converters and a lot of energy is lost along the food chain. Much depends on how the animals are fed. Those raised on natural pastures have CO2 emissions 50 per cent less than those raised on concentrated feed grown using artificial fertilisers.

Free-range is best. That’s partly why British lamb, for instance, has a bigger carbon footprint than New Zealand lamb, even when the latter has been shipped halfway across the world. You may think that all lamb is free-range, but British lambs are given fodder, rather than eating pasture, for some of the year. The slaughtering rules and supermarket requirements also mean that British lamb is often trucked all over the country, adding to its carbon footprint.

In addition, farm animals directly produce another potent greenhouse gas. The guts of ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc) generate methane while digesting food. Cattle belch and fart a lot and methane is also generated in slurry tanks. All told, every kilogram of beef raised in a feedlot can be responsible for more than 30kg of greenhouse gases.

So, reducing your meat consumption is good for your carbon footprint. And cutting out beef is best of all. But a word of warning: this good work could easily be undone if you increase your dairy produce intake to compensate. The reason: dairy cows typically produce twice as much methane as beef cattle. That’s why you should manage your dairy intake, too, if you want to reduce the carbon footprint of the food you eat.

3 Avoid over-packaged goods

We all complain about excessive food packaging, but supermarkets say we are reluctant to buy loose food. We should get serious about this, however. One estimate is that the manufacture of packaging for British food produces 10 million tonnes of CO2 in Britain each year, or 170kg for each one of us.

Some retailers claim that extra packaging reduces damage to food – and so wastage – during transportation, but a lot of packaging has more to do with presentation than anything else. And if all that packaging is really necessary for safe transportation, then that’s another reason to buy local produce, which generally has the least packaging.

If we must have packaging, does it matter what kind? Plastic is usually bad news, as it takes more energy to produce than cardboard. And whereas most cardboard can be recycled, many types of plastic can’t. Aluminium cans have the biggest carbon footprint of any form of packaging because it takes a large amount of energy to smelt the metal. This means that draught beer is best and bottles are better than cans. If you do buy a can, make absolutely sure that it’s recycled.

Some people are concerned about waste being exported for recycling, but the evidence is that, whether in Beijing or Birmingham, there can often be a good use for our rubbish, so don’t be put off. Even so, it’s better to avoid packaging in the first place.

4 Join a car pool or club

Every day, there are 10 million empty seats in cars on our roads. Sharing your car journey to work could save you hundreds of pounds a year, as well as easing traffic congestion, saving wear and tear on your car and cutting your carbon footprint. Put four people in a car and commuting can become as low carbon as taking the bus. You can, of course, car share informally with work colleagues, but there are also car-sharing websites to match you up with fellow commuters.

Do you commute to work by public transport but keep a car for occasional weekend trips? If so, think about joining a car club, where you just pay for a car when you need one. To work well, car clubs require a critical mass of members because you don’t want to have to travel far to pick up the car. So far, they’ve made most progress in London, encouraged by the big population, high parking charges and large number of people who generally use public transport and only need a car occasionally. Other cities across the country, including Brighton and Southampton, have similar schemes.

5 Cut down on junk mail

Your mailbox is clogging up with CO2 every day. The average adult gets 19kg of junk mail a year, with a carbon footprint from its manufacture and distribution that’s several times greater. The Royal Mail will stop delivering unaddressed junk mail if you e-mail it at optout@ royalmail.com. To ask not to receive the junk mail with your name and address on, sign up with the Mailing Preference Service at www.mpsonline.org.uk.

Fearful of losing profitable business because of a green-minded backlash against junk mail, the Royal Mail has announced a responsible mail service. This will offset the CO2 emissions from the paper manufacture, printing and transportation of your mail. Don’t let this deter you from stopping your junk mail, though. As every climate activist will tell you, offsetting emissions is very much second best to preventing emissions in the first place.

6 Reuse and refuse plastic bags

We get through 17 billion plastic bags a year, which is approaching one each every day. Reduce this plastic trail by taking plastic or reusable bags shopping with you and asking staff not to give you a bag when you pay. This is becoming a worldwide movement. It started in small communities, where retailers agreed not to hand plastic bags out any more, but is growing fast. Later this year, San Francisco will become the largest US city to date to ban the plastic bag.

The supermarkets see this as a sales opportunity, of course. They want to sell us reusable, “bag for life” bags. This is fine, but all bags are reusable, unless they break, and your home is probably already full of them, so start by reusing those. And here’s another use for plastic bags: use them to line your rubbish bins at home.

7 Holiday in the UK

Maybe, after this year’s wet summer, this isn’t the best time to mention it but Britain is one of the world’s top holiday destinations. People cross the globe to sample our delights, so why miss out on a good thing? Check out our back yard and cut your carbon footprint into the bargain.

Holidays are among our biggest sources of CO2 emissions and the main element is the flight. An economy return flight from the UK to Florida or New York creates emissions equivalent to a year’s car use. And a return flight to Lanzarote emits as much as a power station generating your share of domestic electricity for a year. For millions of us, our carbon footprint from flying is bigger than for everything else we do and buy.

Unlike most other parts of our lives, there are no off-the-shelf ways of being a greener flyer. For many of us, the single biggest step we can take to cut our carbon footprint is to stop flying and start holidaying closer to home.

If you don’t want to holiday in the UK, restrict yourself to Europe and go by train or ferry rather than plane. It is slower, and probably more expensive, but you can make the journey part of the holiday. Through the Alps, down the Rhine, across the lagoon into Venice: all are great journeys. You’ll wonder why you ever flew.

8 Be eco when staying in hotels

We’ve all seen the signs in hotel rooms asking us to reuse the towels. We wouldn’t change our towel at home every day, so why do it on holiday? And just because you’re not paying directly for the electricity, don’t leave the lights on. Do the energy-saving things you would do at home. Take a shower not a bath, don’t use or remove all the (probably imported) soaps and lotions, don’t leave the TV on standby, don’t have the air conditioning on all the time and always turn it off when you leave the room. If your room’s only a couple of floors up, take the stairs rather than the lift – you know you need the exercise.

Try and find a hotel that plausibly advertises its green credentials. Look out for hotels belonging to the Green Tourism Business Scheme or with the Energy Star rating, but don’t be too seduced by eco chic. The good news is that the hotels with the smallest carbon footprint are, often, the simplest and cheapest.

Research the public transport system where you’re going beforehand (many publish their routes and timetables online) and pick a hotel close to a station or bus route, so you aren’t dependent on taxis and hire cars.

9 Don’t bin things: reuse, Freecycle and buy second-hand

The car may not be green, but the car boot sale certainly is. And don’t just sell your stuff there, buy as well. Green chic comes cheap and cheerful and from the school playground on a Saturday morning.

The green consumer also goes to jumble sales, buys used books, searches out bargains in antiques shops and checks out charity shops for clothes and other goodies: it’s all had one life already, so it’s carbon neutral. By keeping old products in circulation, you’re preventing them from being dumped or put in landfill and preventing their carbon from leaking back into the atmosphere.

While your friends are bargaining away on eBay, why not go one step further and check out the Freecycle network? It’s dedicated to giving used things away. Freecycle started in the US, but there are local groups all over Britain now, as you will quickly find at www.freecycle.org.

10 Keep your clothing footprint small

A low-carbon wardrobe is also a small wardrobe. Buy second-hand whenever possible and when you buy new, ensure they’re things you really like and will wear for years. Fast fashion is bad for your carbon footprint. And bear in mind that the majority of your clothing footprint probably comes not from the purchase but from keeping it clean.

Here’s the equation for a cotton T-shirt. Growing the cotton generates about 1kg of CO2, mostly from manufacturing the fertilisers and pesticides used and from pumping the 30 or so bathtubs of water needed for irrigation. Turning that cotton into a shirt and transporting it to a store near you generates around another 2kg. However, you’ll use around 4kg washing and tumble drying it a typical 25 times. Denim jeans and cotton knickers come out much the same.

Other fibres, such as viscose and polyester, take more energy to make than cotton but use less subsequently because they’re often washed at lower temperatures and dry more easily.

To minimise your clothing footprint, you should wash at a lower temperature than it says on the label (even Marks & Spencer now recommends this) and always put a full load in the machine. Mothball that tumble drier because it’s one of your home’s biggest energy guzzlers. Invest instead in a washing line and an indoor clothes dryer. And forget about ironing, unless it’s essential.

Source: http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2846571.ece