Given the environmental concerns on
the widespread use of single-use plastic bottles, are aluminum cans the ideal
packaging of natural spring water on the go?
By: Ringo Bones
According to environmental experts,
if current trends continue, as in 8 million metric tons of plastic ending up in
our oceans each year, there would be more single-use plastic wastes in our
oceans than fish by weight in the year 2050. Would replacing single-use plastic
with a more “recyclable” material be the way to go? “Aluminum cans have the
highest recycling rate of any product out there and a recycled can could be
back on the shelf as another one in just 60 days,” said Ariel Booker,
co-founder of CanO Water. The company was founded by three friends – Ariel Booker,
Perry Alexander Fielding and Josh White, all are under the age of 25 when they
started back in February 17, 2017.
There is little doubt that during
the past few years that aluminum has outpaced plastics in terms of recycling.
As of June 2018, 73.6-percent of all use beverage package recycling in the EU,
Switzerland, Norway and Iceland are of aluminum cans, and the rate in Germany
and Finland is 99-percent. Given its widespread recyclability, is aluminum cans
the ideal container for drinking water on the go?
Unfortunately, I still have doubts
whether the resulting environmental impact of reducing the amount of plastic
entering our oceans annually will be transferred to the increased carbon
footprint in the transport of CanO Water given that aluminum is several times
heavier than the PET plastic competition. And given my experience with
industrial polymers from high-school chemistry, I too have doubts on how many
times we can recycle / reprocess PET plastic bottles with reasonable economic
viability and environmental impact. Maybe CanO Water is environmentally
friendly in the long run but given that the product has only been widely
marketed during the last quarter of 2018, only time will tell if the aluminum
can packaging of CanO Water will prove more environmentally friendly than the
PET plastic bottle competition.
