Our (Apple) Green Hero
I was so delighted to see this innovation from Apple Green Service Stations that it literally inspired me start a monthly post about corporations that I want to applaud for going the extra mile to help save the planet.
Plastic bottles are a huge scourge on the planet. Plastic bottles and bottle caps rank as the third and fourth most collected plastic trash items in the Ocean Conservancy’s annual September beach cleanups in more than 100 countries.
In 2016 sales of bottled water officially surpassed soft drinks. But in recent years the world had awakened to the growing crisis of plastic waste. The backlash against the glut of discarded bottles polluting the oceans and filling up landfills has been growing quickly. Carrying plastic bottles of water around is uncool.
What is cool is wearing them: Hip fashion translates into designer clothes made of recycled water bottles. There’s even a growing market of luxury, stainless steel refillables, including a limited-edition bottle covered with thousands of Swarovski crystals that sells for almost $2,000.
Once bottles have become rubbish enterprising business's are turning them into carpets, flooring, and boats, clothing and even houses. A company in Canada recently built a 3 bed home using mainly plastic bottles... 612,000 of them.
In laboratories, new versions of bottles claiming to be biodegradable or compostable appear regularly, and plastic industry chemists are experimenting with “chemical recycling” that returns the polymers to their constituent monomers, enabling them to be remade multiple times into new plastic bottles.
Pepsi have pledged to increase recycled content in all its plastic packaging to 25 percent by 2025.
Coca-Cola pledged to recycle a used bottle or can for every one the company sells by 2030 and increase recycled material in plastic bottles to 50 percent by 2030. Coca-Cola pledged to recycle a used bottle or can for every one the company sells by 2030 and increase recycled material in plastic bottles to 50 percent by 2030.
But Apple Green Service Stations have beaten them to it by creating a 100% compostable water carton and that is why they are my inaugural Natural Hero.
If you know of a company who are making an inspiring contribution to healing the planet please let me know. I will be doing a Natural Hero every month.
