Quantifying the bottled water opportunity

Great presentation this week at the Sustainable Brands conference from the chief sustainability officer at Clorox, including a number of things they’re doing to both create greater sustainability practices in their core business, as well as build new product lines (such as Green Works) that set a high bar for sustainable manufacturing and ingredients.

He offered some fascinating stats related to bottled water I wanted to share here.

According to Clorox’s research, 60 million water bottles are thrown away every day in the United States. Only 14 percent of those bottles are recycled.

Clorox sells the Brita water pitchers and filters, which is why these statistics are important to them. According to Clorox, the Brita filter can replace 300 standard 16.9 oz plastic water bottles. That’s over 15 pounds of plastic saved, not to mention shipping costs and associated carbon emissions with getting bottled waters from plants to retailers to our homes and businesses.

The opportunities to lessen our environmental impact, literally all around us, are staggering.