A New Alternative To Single Use Plastic Water Bottles

Plastic waste is a huge environmental issue and also a potential health concern because of related pollution with microplastics and nano-plastics. Around 90% of the plastic that is theoretically recyclable isn’t actually handled that way because of a lack of sorting options, contamination issues, and economics that favor the use of virgin plastic. The scale and complexity of these issues will require multiple mitigation strategies. One such strategy is the subject of a press release on December 6^th 2022 by a company called Cove that is offering a plastic alternative for the bottled water segment.

Single use plastic packaging plays an important role in the consumer products sector for handling efficiency, convenience, safety, and waste prevention. One of the largest single-use plastic categories is for water bottles. Americans purchase around 50 billion of these bottles every year – 151 per person! World-wide it is estimated that 583 billion water bottles were used in 2021.

There are many reasons for this extraordinary volume. Much of it has to do with convenience, but it also reflects concerns about the safety of tap water sources or at least belief that purchased water has advantages in terms of purity and/or taste. The CDC says that water systems are well regulated by the EPA, but questions still arise. Within the bottled water segment there is a lot of marketing around putative health claims for “alkaline water” or “spring water.” There are, of course, other options for getting something other than tap water and putting it in one’s own reusable water bottles. Some consumers have purified water delivered in large containers or refill them at vending machines. Some have reverse osmosis or filtration systems in their own homes. Water from these sources can be put into refillable bottles.

In spite of these alternatives, it is clear that many people will continue to buy large numbers of the single-use bottles. In fact an article in the Harvard Crimson concludes that outright ban on single use water bottles would be impractical. Acknowledging that reality, a start-up company called Cove has developed a water bottle option based on the natural material PHA (polyhydroxylalkanoate) rather than on petroleum-based plastic. PHA is made through a bacterial fermentation process and the bottles made with it are fully biodegradable. No microplastics are generated during that breakdown process. This biodegradability of PHA is widely recognized. The University of Georgia New Materials Institute concluded that PHA was an “ecofriendly alternative to petrochemical plastics.” A recent article in the journal Nature concluded: “Hence, biodegradable plastics are attracting attention as a solution to the problems caused by plastic waste. Among biodegradable plastics, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) and poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) are particularly noteworthy because of their excellent marine biodegradability.”

The vision expressed by Cove founder and CEO Alex Totterman is to eventually convert much of the plastic used for consumer packaged goods (CPGs) with PHA so that the “end of life” scenarios for these containers is better for the environment than is the case today. Cove launched a PHA-based bottled water product on December 1th in the Erewhon premium organic grocery chain in Los Angles.

The expectation is that there will be consumers in those stores who are willing to pay a 20-30% price premium for a bottle with the environmental “credentials” of being bio-based, fully compostable and free from micro-plastics. The expectation is that at scale, the cost to manufacture the PHA bottles will become competitive with normal plastics and the use of that material could expand to non-premium water bottles and eventually to other products. Cove has invested a lot in developing PHA related technologies and now have considerable IP in that area. They were named Plastic-Free Innovation of the Year in 2019. They are backed by several investors including Valor Equity, Marc Benioff, James Murdoch, Tony Robbins and Peter Rahal.

There are many bio-based plastic products of various type on the market with the claim of being “compostable.” In reality many are not actually broken down in existing composting systems and some trash haulers specifically instruct homeowners not to put them in the “Green Waste” bin. Cove has worked with a waste handler company in California called Agromin to confirm the compatibility of their bottles with a real life composting operation. The bottles do break down under that company’s normal process conditions, but even if the degradation is not complete, what remains is easily chopped up and safe to use as a mulch etc.