Vestal by Zip – Environment

Removing bottle waste – both glass and plastic – was one of the main drivers for developing the Vestal system.

Australians purchase more than 726 million litres of bottled water and discard more than 118,000 tonnes of plastic drink bottles a year, of which a dismally low 30% are recycled. The remaining 82,600 tonnes (about the same in weight as 10,000 African elephants) is discarded into landfill, where each individual bottle will take around 1,000 years to break down.

Plastic bottles that end up in the ocean create a hazard for wildlife, and eventually disintegrate into miniscule microplastics, the impacts of which are yet to be fully understood. It is estimated that by 2050, the mass of plastic in the ocean will exceed that of fish.

Plastic is made from oil, which in turn is made from animal and plant organisms that lived 150 million years ago (i.e. in the Jurassic period) and is a finite resource. The manufacture and transport of bottled water in Australia requires over 460,000 barrels of oil each year.

Australians import water from as far away as Italy and France, over the oceans and through the air. All this contributes tonnes of greenhouse gases to the environment each year – just to contain a product that flows practically freely, from the tap.

Vestal by Zip was created to disrupt this waste. Vestal’s on-tap water delivery system eliminates the need to purchase, store, refrigerate and dispose of single use bottles. A Vestal system removes the associated boxes and shrink wrapping used to store and sell bottles. Thousands of pallets of packaged water products are no longer shipped by the freight transport industry, in turn reducing greenhouse gases associated with haulage and importation.

Plus, Vestal’s efficient cooling technology chills the water as it is used, eliminating unnecessary en masse refrigeration, saving hundreds of dollars in power costs and shrinking greenhouse gas emissions.

Removing bottled water from your purchasing means no stock monitoring, no storage problems, and no waste – better for your bottom line, and better for the planet. Vestal provides 24 resusable bottles per system free of charge to further eliminate waste.

What’s more, Vestal is a true triple bottom line business. We invite our clients to join us and partner with WHOLE WORLD Water, helping build, install and maintain clean drinking water systems for the more than one billion people worldwide living without this most basic human need. This also prevents further plastic waste ending up in the ocean, as many poor communities depend on bottled product for safe drinking water.

Source: https://www.coolaustralia.org/bottled-water-secondary/