How many water miles does your organisation clock up each month?

With all of the world’s attention on COP26 over the last week we all know, now more than ever, how important it is to do “our bit” to protect the environment. Most people routinely recycle and take their bags for life to do a food shop.  But did you know that by getting rid of your bottled cooler you can do something to help via your workplace too?

The main environmental impact of bottled coolers is the CO2 emissions… We routinely see customers who have a bottled cooler from a company 50 + miles away from them.  When you rent a bottled cooler, your provider will deliver – normally weekly or every 2 weeks – the full bottles of water to your office and take away the empties. So if your provider is 50 miles away from you, that’s a 100-mile round trip just to deliver water to you.  If you order twice per month that’s almost 2500 miles per year! 

This means that your bottled water will result in is over a tonne of carbon emissions* a year just for your water delivery!  But there are hidden miles involved in bottled water…..   If you use a big national brand, chances are they have delivery hubs or sites across the whole of the UK.  But – and this is the thing – they might only have 1 or 2 water source sites in the whole of the UK.  So if you are based in Manchester chances are your water has been bottled in Scotland and driven on a huge haulage vehicle to your Manchester depot.  This could be a round trip of 450 miles just for the local depot to take delivery of the water.  That is a HUGE amount of CO2 emissions that as a consumer you might never think about.

So, what happens if you get your bottled water from a smaller / local company? Smaller bottled water cooler companies may not have the resources to have their own bottling plant.  As such they may well buy from a large-scale distributor of already bottled water. This means that yet again your local company in Kent might be buying their water from a bottling plant in Nottingham. And all of this BEFORE the water gets delivered to your door.

There are literally millions and millions of bottled water cooler bottles in use today.  As well as being driven up and down the country, and loaded in and out of vans, these bottles then have to be sterilised, refilled, rebranded and packaged up to be shipped back out to the thirsty customers. As well as all of this, bottled coolers need to be cleaned 4 times a year – so yet more vans driving to your site!

 If only there was a more environmentally friendly option?

Well, there is – Plumbed in water coolers. They guarantee to cost you far less money. They have no cumbersome bottles to store. You can literally never run out no matter how warm the British summer gets! You are using a local water source which is then chilled and filtered, so the water is travelling far fewer miles. Plumbed in coolers are the future, so get in contact with us today to save you business money and slash your business CO2 emissions.

* source – calculator.carobfootprint.com