Tesco in UK becomes the first supermarket to sell water in aluminium cans instead of plastic bottles. The retailer is now selling spring water in 500 ml aluminium cans at its 700 stores under the CanO Water brand. The brand was started two years ago in London with a sustainable vision. These are less harmful to the environment than plastic bottles because of infinite recyclability. Plastics can take hundreds of years to break down into ever smaller pieces. This infiltrates the food chain and affects the environment.
Plastic can only be recycled five to ten times because the quality degrades with each cycle, while aluminium cans are ‘infinitely recyclable’ because it does not affect its purity.
“Aluminium cans have the highest recycling rate of any product out there and a recycled can could be back on the shelf as another one in just 60 days,” says CanO Water co-founder Ariel Booker.
He hopes that his sustainable products will rival industry giants because of its reduced environmental footprints. He also thinks the minimal design of the can and aggressive social media following will attract the younger generation to use a more sustainable product.
Plastic bottles are a major component of the total volume of plastic entering the ocean every minute. A Greenpeace investigation last year found that the six biggest companies in the soft drinks sector sell more than 2 million tonnes of disposable plastic bottles a year. About 6.6 per cent of this are made from recycled material. Britain, meanwhile, works its way through 13bn plastic bottles a year – a significant portion of which are used for water.
Tesco’s move to sell water in aluminium cans came in the week after Iceland became the first supermarket in the UK to sell plastic-free chewing gum substituting it from a type of tree sap instead.
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