Bottled Water is Out, Skinned Water is In
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 07. 4.07
We've made no secret of our disaffection towards bottled water at TreeHugger. The costs in terms of fuel usage and recycling are enormous. So it was with a great deal of enthusiasm that we first read about Sidel's innovative NoBottle, which the company is pitching as a "water skin."
Unlike traditional PET (polyethylene terephthalate) half-liter water bottles which weigh in around 13 to 16 grams, Sidel's NoBottle comes in at just under 10 grams. Though perhaps not very impressive in itself, when added up (160 billion liters of bottled water were consumed last year) the savings in terms of waste reduction become quite significant. So, no, we're not talking about losing the plastic entirely here (we wish), but this is still a big step forward for the beverage industry.
Sidel used its proprietary plastic technology, dubbed Flex, to make this new "water skin." Because it is highly flexible and has shape-memory, Flex allows the bottle to spring back to its original shape upon being compressed or gripped in any way. The French company plans on officially unveiling the NoBottle at K 2007, an international trade fair, in October.
Via ::Springwise: Water skin reduces waste (blog), ::Sidel launches NoBottle, a new concept in PET bottle packaging for water (press release)
See also: ::San Francisco Mayor Bans the Bottle, ::Bottled Water: Unintended Consequences, ::No Bottled Water in Mario Batali's New York Restaurant, ::Wedjaget That Bottled Water?
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Talking Faucet Spouts Off, Angers Bottled Water Company
- Ad Campaign for Tap Water Proclaims Obama Victory
- The Disappearing Male
- Hydrogen Fuel Cell Waste Water to Be Bottled & Sold in India
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If you need to - Just filter your tap water.
We use a brita, and our neighbours intalled a reverse osmosis system from Sears.
Anything is better than buying all that plastic.
Agreed, the home reverse osmosis filters are more than enough. I personally prefer them over the Brita types, but to each his own, as long as your using the much more efficient delivery route that we all have built-in to our homes.
unfiltered tap water taste good.
Cool idea, but I agree with the others. Get a water filter. I decided to do a one up on the britta and installed a Reverse Osmosis filter. I put up some pics of it at the end of this blog post: Whirlpool RO Filter
Of course if municipalities and businesses would make clean, filtered drinking water available at public taps they could save tons of space and volume at their landfills.
Portland used to have drinking fountains in its downtown area that had very clean water available. San Francisco and New York cities both have some of the cleanest sourced drinking water in the nation that frequently exceeds the purity of bottled waters before chlorination.
Any large building, school, college or university would save considerable money in waste management if clean drinking water was available in its public spaces for people to fill their own canteens from. These systems would cost much less to operate than cleaning up the waste bottles as they do now.
Why can't we just make clean drinking water available?
One of the things I like best about city living is our yummy tap water. :^)
What's exciting here is the design innovation of using less material to produce the same value. What if it were used to contain all sorts of other things that (for some reason or another) seem to only come packaged in plastic, like other beverages or liquid soaps? OR, what if we could design out petroleum-based plastics completely? It seems like we're heading in a good direction here.
Hmmm...a 30% reduction in the plastic used - well done.
A 1% reduction in the total weight of the product - not so impressive.
A 'water skin'? No, it's still a bottle.
With a nice shape and some lovely graphics of a hummingbird. And it will still be in the bin, on the way to landfill, within the hour.
Less bad is still bad.
Do you have a source for the "over 50% of bottled water is tap water" statistic? This could be very useful.
Thanks!
C'mon people, this is just more greenwashing of an a product that can't be greenwashed. I don't care how environmentally friendly the packaging is, or how much of revenues are donated to green causes - we have to break the bottled water habit.
I'm not sure if it was as high as 50%, but the source was probably the NRDC study from a few years back. Here's the link: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp
Just to clarify, though it may seem like it, we don't want to imply that we support bottled water through this post. While we'd much rather see plastic bottles eliminated completely and more people switching to reverse osmosis filters, we're also realistic and know that it will take a while before we see a large enough number of adherents to make an impact. This technology is only beneficial in the sense that it does help reduce waste but is obviously not the best solution. Great discussion!
I rebottled tap water in a used comercial water bottle and then conducted a taste test including 5 commerical bottled water selections. My Jr. College students could not pick it out of the group.
Sounds good, but sounds like a good spin too...
I think plastic is in general not a good place to keep drinking water - different sources confirm this.
drinking from tap fills your body with fluriods(the one the industry sells you as being good for your teeth), which are highly toxic (by product of aluminumproduction) and I have not found a filter yet, that eliminated fluriod entirely...
And then: if we have filtered all the water - can we say it is still good to drink (without all these minerals? :))
The question is always, where to start or where to stop..;)
I'm a tap water fan too. But recently I've been wondering, is tap water tested for things like hormones and drugs that enter the water system through human consumption and disposal of expired drugs in the toilets?