The company has recently redesigned its labels and packaging to communicate the change to consumers, and has highlighted the move as a major step for the business to become more environmentally sustainable.
Mountain Valley CEO, Breck Speed, said: “We’re committed to being a leader in sustainability in the beverage world, even though we’ve found consumers sometimes have a hard time understanding exactly what the word ‘sustainability’ means. But surveys show consumers clearly understand the concept of recycling and they know recycling is something everyone can do to make a difference in their communities. So our new label emphasises our commitment to sustainability through recycling by saying simply: ‘If you’ll recycle it again, we’ll use it again’.
“The missing link in bottled water container recycling in the US is someone who’s willing to buy and reuse the recycled material,” he added. “We plan to help kick-start and improve PET recycling efforts by creating economic demand for recycled content.”
Before Mountain Valley began using rPET packaging, the company was well-known for distributing bottled water in glass, and it currently uses 35% recycled cullet in the manufacture of the glass containers.
Speed explained that the business initially found it difficult to find a high-quality, reliable supplier of the rPET resin, but has now signed an agreement with New Horizons Plastic Recycling in South Carolina. Mountain Valley teamed up with its subsidiary Veriplas Containers to source the FDA-approved, recycled PET resin in its water bottles.
Although Mountain Valley will be the first to use rPET containers for its branded water products, it also plans to make rPET containers immediately available to the customers of its Veriplas Container subsidiary.
Supplying over 60 independent water bottlers in the US with PET containers, the company has announced that it has already received strong indications of interest for rPET use from many of them.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024
