It is estimated that in the UK alone we use in excess of 7.5 Billion single use plastic bottles every year. That’s a staggering figure, and depressingly far too many are not recycled at all with up to 700,000 just thrown carelessly away as litter each and every day. Many due to an additional colour print wrapping are impossible to recycle at all and go to landfill or incineration.
I guess much as with supermarket free plastic carrier bags it will take a real change in consumer habits to make inroads into this problem but I think it is possible. People watching recently in our local large supermarket I guess over half of customers were using a form of “bag for life” or certainly avoiding the 5p throwaways. A large volume of retailed bottles contain simply still drinking water and there is a sensible convenient viable alternative to continuing to buy throw away bottled water.
Here at KSV Vending we use in-house one of our range of direct chilled fully filtered water coolers. Most of our staff has either a sports or cycling water bottle they fill here in the office, or others are like me and use and reuse again for weeks a 300 or 500ml fizzy drink bottle. Once everyone is into a routine with this the reflection is always it is much cheaper and easier than stopping off to buy a bottle every day, here it’s chilled and free at the point of use.
Brighton Council locally are currently considering public water fountains in high footfall locations to encourage people to ditch the single use bottle habit and top up their own. Many of our traditional hot drinks machine customers now include a direct chilled water cooler as part of their staff package, and a much greater availability of these both in workplaces and public locations could start to make real inroads into the demand for throwaway plastic bottles.
Written by: Colin from KSV.