Going Green–It’s the Little Things Part V: Water Bottle
Your customers appreciate when they come into your store and you offer them a cool bottle of water to quench their thirst. It’s polite and invites the customers to feel at home in your store. Your employees appreciate the convenience of the bottled water in the store as well. But how many bottles of water does your store hand out a month? Don’t forget about your monthly manager or sales meeting where you pow-wow about your store over refreshing bottles of water. We commend you for being a good host and offering a drink, as well as for you commitment to promoting a healthful lifestyle; however, those little bottles create a lot of waste, especially if they go unrecycled. These water bottles can be detrimental for the environment if they are tossed in the trash. A report on the popularity of water bottle usage, in California specifically, is sparking a new threat on the environment altogether, especially with the hot summer months ahead.
So what are you supposed to do? Stop hydrating your employees and customers? No, not necessarily. If you aren’t recycling your bottles, that’s the first step you can take. However, it’s hard to regulate your customers walking off the lot and tossing their empty bottles in the trash on the way. And setting up a security check at the exit out isn’t very enticing.
An alternative to the bottled water business is to investigate purchasing the 5 gallon bottled water. You know, the
Alhambra or Sparkletts water that gets delivered right to you? This alternative still provides that safety and purity of the personal water bottle, but without all of the waste. It is incredibly convenient, as most companies deliver directly to your home or office.
Still worried about the recycling? No problem–when they deliver the new gallons to your location, they retrieve the used ones and recycle the bottles themselves, reducing the waste and ensuring those bottles don’t end up in the trash. There are many different sizes of bottles and delivery plans so you can find the program that fits best for you.
A cold refreshing glass of water is more inviting than an impersonal bottle anyway. So toss those personal water bottles (in the recycling, of course) and check out the multi-gallon water bottled service. It will be better for the environment and your customers won’t suffer from dehydration in your store either.
For more information on the negative impact of unrecycled bottles, check out this article of the threat it is causing in
California at http://www.consrv.ca.gov/index/news/2003%20News%20Releases/Pages/NR2003-13_Water_Bottle_Crisis.aspx
Interested in investigation the bottled water service? There’s more information about the benefits, convenience and different companies that offer the services, check out http://www.water.com/default.aspx