In a landmark step in support of the circular economy, Harrogate Water, Britain’s oldest bottled water, has announced it has successfully secured sufficient availability of recycled PET (rPET), to ensure all product shall contain 50 per cent recycled content from April.
The recycled PET content will match that of its glass bottles, which have been made with 50 per cent recycled glass content since 2010. All materials used by Harrogate Water are 100 per cent recyclable and none of the company’s waste goes to landfill.
The company, Britain’s largest family-owned independent supplier of naturally-sourced bottled water, is a national partner of environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy and last year they launched a joint recycling campaign aimed at raising awareness of the importance of recycling plastic bottles.
The Incredible Shrinking Bottle Campaign urges consumers to responsibly dispose of their bottles by twisting and capping, making them easy to carry to a recycling point or take home for kerbside recycling.
Harrogate Water CEO James Cain said: “It is not an inevitability that plastic bottles end up in our rivers and oceans. We all have a responsibility to ensure that we dispose of our packaging properly and recycle our bottles so that they can go on to become another bottle or other useful product, just as we already do with our cans and glass bottles. We shouldn’t think of them as ‘single use’; they can have an infinite number of lives.
We supply a totally natural and healthy product, sourced from within a Special Site of Scientific Interest. Caring for the environment is in our DNA which is why we have partnered with Keep Britain Tidy to encourage recycling. We are proud and delighted to take this next step in support of sustainability and the circular economy.”
He added: “PET plastic used to make water bottles is the most environmentally efficient of all packaging solutions providing it is recycled; it uses less energy in manufacture and produces less Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The introduction of recycled PET (rPET) represents a significant investment for the business and is a major step forward. ”
Harrogate Water operates from a world class environmentally-friendly site, which has become a showcase for the global bottled water industry.
