Water Bottle Life Cycle Assessment

This was a short project meant to learn how to use the LCA tool Sustainable Minds by investigating a single-use bottle of water alongside two reusable water containers (one made of plastic, and the other made of stainless steel).

Starting with this bottle I picked up at a local grocery store. As it turns out this comes from a facility not too far from me that bottles their own water then private labels the bottles for local businesses. As far as I could find though, they don’t manufacture the bottles in house, they just fill them.

So I assumed the bottles ship empty to them and then ship full to my store. These things aren’t made of much material, but they’re still harmful in their own way.

Now I wanted to compare my other two bottles at the manufacturing level to get a sense of the difference in impact out of the gate, just in the context of them being a physical thing, before I added the further context them being reusable.

So basically in the effort of making the reusable plastic vessel be more durable, have more parts, and be aesthetically pretty, we used quite a lot more material and and contributed to GHG emissions considerably. And the stainless steel production has an immense impact in its own way.

BUT after one year with one refill per day, including washing, we get see the benefits of the reusable element of these bottles

So the plastic reusable’s performance improves by 99%, and the stainless steel goes up by about 86%.

Why not reuse single-use bottles?

Now, as we get into the improvements section, I thought I’d share this bit first because it was an idea that I had in improving the performance of the single-use bottle.

Why not just use it more?

Seems pretty straight forward, so I looked around for some research on this and as it turns out:

• some of these bottles aren’t easily washed effectively and bacteria seem to really love to reproduce in these plastics

• They’re really good at leeching microplastics into the water contained within them

• And they contaminate contents with chemicals like BPA that can disrupt our bodies’ natural hormones.

Potential improvements to our study bottles

Single-Use

The biggest issues with the single-use bottle, or at least the one I picked up are that

• It’s headed to landfill,

• Using virgin material and

• The pvc label, which while very durable, is actually the most impactful aspect of the bottle and you can see the size comparison between it and the bottle there

So the first thing I did was recycle it, pretty straight forward, but it didn’t do much to improve the performance.

Then I made the body and cap out of recycled material, decent bump there, but as we know the biggest detractor is still that label

So if we remake the label out of recycled PET as well and use a bit less adhesive on it, we get a tremendous increase. Just something to think about when we’re looking at labels on things, kinda crazy

Reusable Plastic Cup

Its biggest issues are that it’s headed to the land fill, the virgin material again, and that it does actually need more material to stand up to being dropped or knocked around, so let’s recycle it.

And then, use the same material, just recycled to increase circularity and reuse material that’s basically just sitting around. Easy.

Reusable Stainless Steel Cup

For its issues, we basically have the same ones, although something that I should have added to the plastic one as well is that these are often designed with new patterns and things to appeal to that over consumption behavior.

So what if we removed the laminate and to increase the behavior of keeping this thing for ever we start a campaign where we ask our customers to decorate the blank bottles themselves and send us pictures of them to show off their creativity on social media? And the slider includes some extra silicone bits that could probably be optimized

And finally the biggest impact let’s recycle the steel and start a takeback program to get that material back to the manufacturer. Potentially even include a life-time warranty as a part of that effort

Maybe then we can even showcase some our favorites that come back to us in a display in our offices to show how much people love our product.