How evian™ is tackling the plastic issue by moving to a circular model
evian’s™ commitment to make all of its plastic bottles from 100% recycled plastic is supporting the development of new technologies and better behaviors that will encourage and enable plastic to be used over and over again within a sustainable circular economy.
Plastic is one of the most versatile and useful materials ever created but it comes with two big issues: where it comes from and where it ends up. Every year, around 350 million tons of virgin plastic are created from the base ingredient of oil. However, not enough existing plastic is being recycled with most destined for landfill or joining the eight million tons that annually flows into our oceans. Solving these two problems could transform our relationship with plastic, enabling us to benefit from its undeniable qualities without worrying about its environmental impact. To achieve this, the world needs to adopt a radically different approach: the circular economy of packaging.
Traditional plastic production takes a linear approach where the raw material is created from scratch almost every time. However, in a circular economy the raw material is recycled within a closed system, without the need to make new plastic. In this sustainable system, used plastic becomes a valuable resource to be collected and recycled into new plastic items: a plastic bottle is made, sold, used, collected, and recycled into a new plastic bottle to be sold again. The goal is to keep every bit of plastic inside the system, drastically reducing plastic waste. At Davos 2018, evian™ helped lead the charge for a circular economy of packaging by publicly committing to making all of its plastic bottles from 100% recycled plastic by 2025.
The challenge is that there is not yet enough recycled plastic to achieve this. Currently not all plastics can be recycled easily if at all—most colored plastics and the multifilm plastics commonly used for food packaging are still unrecyclable. This is bad enough, but to make matters worse these unrecyclable plastics are often innocently mixed up with easily recyclable plastics, such as PET commonly used to make bottles. It is usually too difficult to separate the good plastic from the bad, further reducing the quantity of plastic that is available to be recycled. The solution could lie in developing new technologies that either makes it easier to sort the different plastics or, better still, makes all plastics recyclable. To help achieve this, evian™ is partnering with a breakthrough Canadian tech company called Loop Industries.
Loop has pioneered a revolutionary process that can commercially break down any waste PET plastic into its base building blocks called monomers. These can be repolymerized into virgin-quality PET plastic resin for molding into new items, such as plastic bottles. Loop Industries’ innovative process effectively filters out all the impurities such as dyes, additives, and non-recyclable materials making it possible to recycle PET plastic infinitely and at scale while ensuring the exceptional quality required to protect the purity of evian™ natural mineral water. What’s more, Loop Industries’ process does not rely on the high levels of heat or pressure that traditional recycling does, making it relatively easy to build large-scale recycling plants that are much more cost-effective to operate. In short, Loop Industries can produce industrial quantities of high-quality PET resin entirely from waste plastic in a continuous loop at large scale —a fundamental step towards a circular plastics economy.
Building on this,evian™ is actively encouraging governments, recycling schemes, and manufacturers to make plastics even easier to collect and recycle, ensuring that as much raw material as possible enters the circular system and stays in the system. For this, there is one more key component—us. The success of the circular economy relies on individuals recycling their used plastic rather than binning it or discarding it. To help drive this positive action, evian™ has launched a global social media campaign called Flip It For Good. This fun yet impactful initiative encourages everyone to flip their used plastic bottles into the recycling bin, supporting crucial consumer messaging around how plastic bottles should be recycled and why they need to be recycled so that plastic bottles can have a second life.
evian™ is also looking beyond recycling to its sister pillars of reducing and reusing plastic. As well as redesigning its plastic bottles to contain no virgin plastic, evian™ is disrupting its portfolio of packaging to find new ways of delivering its natural mineral water. evian™ already provides reusable glass bottles to restaurants and is now expanding this scheme to consumers. The Loop by TerraCycle pilot initiative in Paris, France, enables everyone to buy their water in glass bottles that can be returned, refilled, and used again—eliminating plastic entirely. Similarly, in collaboration with visionary designer Virgil Abloh, evian™ has launched a range of refillable glass bottles as part of its “One Drop can make a Rainbow” collection that takes its inspiration from the global call for sustainability. These on-the-go accessories support another 2019 innovation, evian© (re)new, an in-home five-liter water dispenser incorporating a 100% recycled PET skin bubble that significantly reduces the need for plastic packaging.
For more than a decade, evian™ has made all of its bottles 100% recyclable, and by 2025, all of its bottles will be made from 100% recycled plastic bringing the circular economy to life. For the consumer, the confidence that a used plastic bottle not only can be recycled but actually will be recycled makes it worth putting into the right bin. And as more bottles are made from ever growing proportions of recycled plastic, consumers can increasingly choose to say ‘no’ to virgin plastic and ‘yes’ to more sustainable hydration solutions. It’s these choices and actions that could transform the way the world feels about plastic: a circular plastics economy is possible, but it’s up to everyone to help make it happen.
