a bottle made from plants
As well as giving 100% profit to charity, we’ve also got a great bottle… it’s made from plants, not oil! Plastic made from plants? Yes, it is totally possible, and way better for our environment too.
NatureWorks makes the Ingeo natural plastic from corn sugars – but any plant sugars can be used, like sugar cane or wheat.
In the future, Ingeo will be made from agricultural waste and non-food plants. Wouldn’t it be great to make a bottle from NZ based plants? Watch this space!
Another great feature of wurld water bottles is the huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and energy used in the manufacturing process. Compared to traditional plastic used in most bottled water brands (PET), Ingeo natural plastics generates 43% less greenhouse gas emissions and uses 48% less energy (source). Those are huge numbers!
- wurld water bottles have some special features, all part of being made from plants…
- Please do reuse your bottle – fill it wherever you find good water… your office water cooler, public drinking fountains, or your tap at home. However, it won’t last quite as long as normal plastic, but you’ll know when it’s time to get some more wurld water.
- Keep the bottle out of direct sunlight or high heat. It’ll start to warp and turn into interesting shapes, but that’s what comes with an environmentally friendly bottle! And if you do happen to get a warped bottle, take some photos and send them to us.
recycling
All plastic water bottles end up in one of two places – from a rubbish bin it ends up in landfill, from kerbside recycling it ends up being exported to Asia.
Still, both of these options are better than littering, so don’t be a litter bug! These new PLA plastics are considered a number 7 on the recyclables scale. So if you’re able to, definitely put them in your recycle bin if your council collects number 7s. If not, make sure you put them in the rubbish bin. The great thing about our bottle is that wherever it ends up, it’s still non-toxic.
The dream is to work in with other PLA plastic bottle producers and fully recycle the bottles here in NZ. So get buying wurld water where you can, and here’s our details to get order forms for where you can’t! Please do make sure you support other PLA producers if wurld is not available in your local stores yet.
upcycling roadmap
Our PLA bottles are very new technology, so some of NZ’s current recycling systems haven’t quite caught up yet. But it looks like there will be some exciting new developments for recycling (or better still, upcycling) our bottles very soon. If you want to get updates as things progress, just sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know when things start happening.
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Here’s just one example of what’s being worked on at the moment, and it’s almost ready to go. This is the sort of thing that wurld bottles recycled at our events will be fed in to…
- When you’ve finished drinking your wurld water, your bottle will be broken down and mixed with organic nutrients, and used to create a seedling pottle for the forestry and horticulture industries.
- Seedlings are planted in the pottles, so there’s no waste and planting is much quicker. Over the next few years, the pottle degrades releasing those nutrients, helping the tree reach maturity even earlier. The tree also acts as a carbon sink, processing the carbon dioxide in to oxygen.
- When the tree is harvested, any waste can be used as bio-mass to produce… new bottles! A perfect circle…
