Why This Grocery Chain is Ditching Single-Use Bottled Water
By Adele Peters | 4/6/21 | Fast Company
If you walk down the drinks aisle inside one of New Seasons Market’s Portland, Oregon, grocery stores later this month, you’ll notice something missing: A shelf that used to hold bottled water will be mostly empty, with plastic and glass bottles replaced by a smaller number of reusable bottles. Another empty shelf below it will be covered with a sign boosting reuse.
New Seasons Market, a chain of 19 stores primarily based in Oregon, and New Leaf Community Markets, its California-based subsidiary, will no longer sell standard single-use bottled water, starting April 22. “We’ve been thinking about packaging in general for a long time,” says sustainability manager Athena Petty. Two years ago, managers decided to begin planning how to eliminate bottled water from store shelves.
The sustainability challenge from bottled water keeps growing. By one estimate, more than half a trillion plastic bottles will be produced this year, and the majority won’t be recycled. As consumers have become more aware of the problem—and the fact that millions of tons of plastic ends up in the ocean—some water brands have started shifting to different types of packaging. Aluminum cans are especially popular. But New Seasons Market’s decision applies to all aluminum and glass bottles as well.
“We’ve been really trying to lead by making decisions that are science-based,” says Petty, who got feedback from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality as the grocery team researched the impacts of different types of packaging. It’s not that other materials don’t have negatives: Glass, for example, is more likely to be recycled but has a higher carbon footprint when bottles are delivered because it’s heavier. Aluminum cans are also more likely to be recycled but more than half in the U.S. still end up trashed. Making an aluminum can, even with recycled material, also has some environmental impact.