Zero Waste Week
This week (6th – 10th September) is Zero Waste Week (ZWW), an award-winning annual campaign raising awareness about the environmental impact of waste. As a business that invests significant time and resources into reducing our own impact on the planet, Waterlogic is very much aligned with the objectives of this campaign.
Founded in 2008 by Rachelle Strauss, the seeds of ZWW were planted in 2004 when severe flooding in the village of Boscastle in Cornwall, UK directly affected the Strauss family and prompted Rachelle to begin acting to help prevent similar incidents occurring in the future. It was her realisation that man-made climate change may have been responsible for the flooding and that action needed to be taken (a position we increasingly find ourselves in today).
Having started as a UK-only initiative, by 2017 participation had grown to 73 countries with many of them now running their own independent ZWW campaigns.
Zero Waste Week adopts the adage there’s no such place as ‘away’, meaning when we throw something away, it goes somewhere else, often causing harm or toxicity to the eco-system.
The campaign's main directive is to bring awareness to people that we are all individually and collectively responsible for what we consume and that the short time of usefulness is only a small part of the overall life cycle of any product. At Waterlogic, reducing waste and limiting the impact our business has on the environment is of great significance to us. As the impact of climate change becomes more and more real with each passing year, playing our own part and encouraging our customers to do likewise to preserve our planet is a responsibility we take very seriously.
Here are some of the ways we are helping:
- Our 1.4m freestanding and countertop dispensers around the world are helping to save 23.8 billion single-use plastic bottles each year, many of which would otherwise end up in landfill or oceans.
- Taking as many as 30 million single-use plastic bottles out of the hospitality supply chain annually by supplying Purezza machines and reusable glass bottles.
- Refurbishing existing dispensers; in 2020 alone, 21,624 machines were restored to good-as-new order and the plan is to reach over 27,000 by the end of 2021.
- We have also designed a model that reduces shipping and transportation and removes packaging waste.
We are consistently looking at all aspects of our business for ways to reduce waste and we know there’s plenty of work for us to do. For a more in-depth look at our environmental initiatives, take a look at our Greener Thinking report here.
How you can support Zero Waste Week
Please like and share our Zero Waste Week campaign on Waterlogic’s social channels and tell us in the comments below how you reduce waste, either at work or home, or which areas you would like to improve on in the future.