Earthbound salad containers, yea, yea, recycled too!

Naked®.  Yes, Naked®, the attention-grabbing word and tree-huggin’ juice brand recently announced its transition to 100% consumer recycled plastic for their bottles.  ETA 2010.

The reNEWabottle will be used for all Naked Juice flavors, each 32 ounces of flavor.  The transition will decrease new plastic consumption by 1 million pounds per year and oil use by 8,192 barrels.  According to the press release, this is the equivalent of taking 497 cars off the road.  Neat.

Naked juices moves to recycled plastics

Another company, with a less exotic, more wholesome name, Earthbound Farm will also be using 100% recycled plastics in its packaging.  With Earthbound’s recent switch to 100% plastic for its clamshell-style salad containers, the company has conserved 424,000 million BTUs of energy, a lot of water and some other stuff.

This is awesome for plastics packaging in the US.  It also gives bottling companies more incentive to invest in recycling plants.

>> Earthbound Farms
>> Naked Juice

Recycle

I was reading an article today on Environmental Leader about the plastics industry increasing its recycling efforts.  It made me think about packaging for other items as well…like video cards.

The other day I was in Best Buy looking for a TV tuner and I found myself in and around the video cards.  Four or five years ago, when I last purchased a video card (before moving to a laptop full-time), there were colors everywhere!  Packaging was easily 19x the size of the video card!  Last week, the packaging that displayed before me was light, agile and somewhat boring.

I’ve noticed this with other items as well, like when I purchased my new cell phone.  Everything was stuffed in there so tight that everything would not have fit if you emptied everything on a bed and randomly jammed it back in so  you could return the item as quickly as possible.

I’m sure this phenomena, however, is in correlation with an attempt to cut costs.  But anyway, the article about the plastics dudes…

PWP Industries recently announced that it is to open a second recycling facility with the annual capacity to recycle 40 million pounds of post-consumer plastics.  It is expected to open in the second quarter of 2010.  There is a second phase of the plan, which will roll-out the following year.

Another bottled water company, Native Waters, LLC, is introducing a product Native Water, which boasts environmentally friendly packaging.  The European plastics industry launched a plastics challenge, dubbed “The Plastics 2020 Challenge” to promote doubling the rate of plastics packaging by 2020.  Hopefully the US will follow suit.

>> Related Article on Environmental Leader

Boxed Water of Green Rapids, Michigan

As Boxed Water is Better puts it, they “started with the simple idea of creating a new bottled water brand that is kinder to the environment and gives back a bit - we found that it shouldn’t be bottled at all, but instead, boxed. So we looked to the past for inspiration in the century old beverage container and decided to keep things simple, sustainable, and beautiful.”

Roughly 85% of the Boxed Water box is from renewable resources, including trees, that “when harvested in a responsible, managed and ethical way serve as an amazing renewable resource.”  Because of this, Boxed Water donates 10% of their profits to reforestation foundations.  Another 10% of profits goes to world water relief foundations.

Based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Boxed Water Is Better is carbon-filtered, purified, simple and refreshing.  Launched in March of 2009, the company is looking to expand, with 15 plus distributors in Michigan.

A recent article on the Inhabitat website note that only 14% of water bottles are recycled and America contributes 30 million plastic water bottles to landfills every day.  That is insane!  Move over milk, water is coming to town.  Not in your town yet?  Try an Eco Canteen™.

Boxed Water Is Better