Goodbye and Good Riddance to Plastic Bottles

Despite recycling in some states, the mountain of wasted /disposed plastic bottles still grows every year.

Every year, people around the world use so many plastic bottles that they would encircle the Earth 26 times. And this consumption increases every year. The waste caused by plastic bottles creates major environmental problems because 70–90% of them are never recycled, thus ending up in landfills and oceans, posing a threat to our health and that of the environment.

Taking all this seriously, as well as caring for people’s health, and for animals and the environment, the Swiss company Nature’s Design Products GmbH developed the first 100% environmentally friendly ECO bottles under the brandname THANK YOU. They are made entirely of natural materials and are biodegradable. This is how we bring sustainability to one of our most important daily habits.

Annually, we consume more than 150,000,000,000 (that is 150 billion!) liters of water in plastic bottles. A vast majority (70–90%) are never recycled and end up in landfills or worse, the ocean, and this harms the environment because they take hundreds of years to decompose. Worldwide, huge piles of plastic bottles will remain there for the next generations. If this use is not drastically reduced, who knows what the impact will be on our grandchildren?

Countless plastic bottles also end up in the oceans where, due to currents, they form “plastic islands”. When fish, turtles and other animals get entangled in them, they are exposed to fatal risks. They may choke on a bottle or ingest micro-particles that are harmful to their health. In addition they are harmful to human’s health as well as they may enter our body through the food chain. If the use of plastic bottles is not reduced, marine life will suffer and we might not be able to eat fish in the future.

Due to such dire consequencies, the sale of plastic bottles has already been outlawed in some parts of the world (San Francisco, Grand Canyon National Park, Concord MA, Bundanoon in Australia, the University of Seattle, and elsewhere). We hope that soon more cities, states and countries will follow.

The devastating truth about plastic bottles as well as the good news about an increasing awareness of the problem, have encouraged Swiss entrepreneur Alois Britschgi and his business partner Nico Cocchiarella to start creating solutions. After 18 months of new product development, a prototype of the first 100% environmentally friendly bottle was developed. We believe that people who care about this, and the Earth, are grateful for every water bottle user who swears off plastic, and therefore the new family of bottles was named THANK YOU.