The problem with plastic water bottles

Keynote: William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle & Kim Jeffery, CEO of Nestlé Water, North America

“It’s a design problem.”

That’s what William McDonough said as he patiently explained his work with Nestlé Water North America on rethinking their packaging. McDonough, along with Michael Braungart is the author of the book Cradle to Cradle, an inspiring call for industrial transformation to a world where the very concept of waste is eliminated.  McDonough shared the stage with Kim Jeffery, CEO of Nestlé Water North America as Friday morning’s keynote address at the recent North American Net Impact Conference.

Nestlé Water hired McDonough’s firm to help them design a system to increase the recycling of the ever present plastic bottle. The talk covered everything from why caps are not recyclable along with the bottle to the virtues of drinking water instead of pop. CEO Jeffery probably knew that this audience was not going to welcome his company with open arms. So, the talk started with Jeffery explaining how the market for bottled water has developed over the last 20 years and the fact that their sales have largely eaten into the sales of companies like Coke and Pepsi. While perhaps this group of savvy business students should have been more appreciative of the power of the market, no one was buying the line that Nestlé Water was our savior in a transparent plastic bottle.

Indeed, the bottle itself was on the stand and the charge was unacceptable levels of waste. To many in this Nalgen carrying crowd, the solution was simple: just refill your reusable water bottle from the tap or filtered water jug and don’t buy bottled water. When Jeffery was asked why not encourage the use of reusable bottles, the auditorium erupted in applause. Meanwhile, Jeffery became visible defensive in front of the crowd of 2000 as he repeated his description of his company’s reusable five gallon bottle commercial service from earlier in the talk and ignored the obvious intend of the question to probe at the retail level.

However, despite the emotion, I think that Jeffery had made an important commitment. One that went, perhaps, under recognized at the time. As CEO of a major bottled water manufacturer, he expressed his clear support for the sector taking financial responsibility for their product packaging. While this is not a revolutionary idea in Europe where some countries have laws to require manufacturers to take back their products at the end of their useable lives, I believe it is a significant position to take in North America and represents an important sign of how far the industry has come.

By the end of the talk, I came to have a much better appreciation for the difficulty of the challenge of increasing recycling. The states and sometimes municipalities have each taken their own approach to recycling creating a fragmented system that does not have a unified way of handling returned plastics. Meanwhile, the recycling rates have actually fallen in the US over the last 20 years. Just what it will take to change people’s behavior is not an easy question. And while bottle bills work, Jeffery feels that they are not scalable to cover all of bottles. Retailers are not set up to handle returns. Bills were written to deal with litter, not address the failure of residential recycling programs.

Still, though, I am hopeful that McDonough and his team can come up with something better and that Nestlé will retain their commitment to fixing recycling in America.