Premium American water brand Kopu is providing a turnkey sustainability solution for the luxury hospitality industry, enabling major hotel groups like Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott to replace problematic glass and plastic bottles with elegant, infinitely recyclable aluminium packaging and a built-in recycling program.
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For decades, the water service in high-end hotels has been dominated by imported European brands in heavy glass bottles. While theoretically recyclable, glass presents immense practical challenges in hospitality settings. “Hospitality bottled water over the last 40 years has been dominated by three imported European brands, all bottled in a different hemisphere and shipped to the U.S. in glass bottles, most of which are destined for community landfills after consumption,” says Kopu co-founder and CEO, Justin Mahy.
Hospitality is going green
The low scrap value of glass, combined with its weight, high transport emissions and the need for complex colour-sorting, means much of it is never recycled. Recognising these issues, Kopu identified aluminium as a superior material that meets both sustainability targets and the high aesthetic standards of its clients. Mahy explains, “We chose aluminium due to market economics and the recycling infrastructure that is built around this material. Aluminium scrap is worth USD 1,000 to 2,000 per tonne, where empty plastic bottles are worth a fraction.”
To create a bottle that was both beautiful and functional, Kopu partnered with global packaging leader Trivium Packaging. The result is a distinctive bottle with a "soft shoulder" silhouette made with 25 per cent recycled content. Creating this premium look posed technical challenges. The vibrant, detailed branding is achieved through a dry-offset printing process using eco-friendly, non-toxic inks.
Step forward for the circular economy
However, Kopu’s key innovation goes beyond the bottle itself. The company launched the Kopu Aluminium Stewardship (KAS) Program, a comprehensive closed-loop system designed specifically for hotels and resorts. The program provides custom-branded recycling receptacles for both guest-facing areas and back-of-house operations, ensuring that all Kopu bottles, along with other aluminium cans from sodas or beers, are collected for recycling.
Crucially, Kopu tracks the weight of aluminium delivered and collected at each property, providing clients with tangible data on their capture rates and waste reduction. The impact is significant. “One client, a 500-room resort in Miami, calculated that they eliminated 52 tonnes of landfill waste in a single year by replacing their imported water brands with Kopu,” Mahy shares.
This data-driven, full-service model is empowering hotel teams who have felt powerless to change the amount of waste their operations create. As the demand for sustainable packaging solutions grows, the trend is creating new opportunities for value-added products in the aluminium sector. By providing a complete system, Kopu demonstrates how aluminium is the foundation for a sustainable service industry.
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