CA Couple Dreams Up Solution To Water Bottle Pollution

SANTA MONICA, CA — A luxury car pulls up to a valet at a ritzy hotel in Los Angeles. An attendant opens the door, the driver steps out, and he’s handed a complimentary water — a plastic bottle destined for the landfill.

The founders of KOPU Sparkling Water, a California-based sparkling water company, saw the problem and wanted to make a difference in their corner of the world. Their solution? If a water bottle has to be single-use, it should be packaged in aluminum.

"Walking down the street in Los Angeles you have a 90 percent chance of seeing a discarded plastic bottle. It’s terrible, and we’ve only just started to fix this," KOPU founder Justin Mahy said. "KOPU is the tip of the spear for pushing environmental stewardship in bottled water."

The luxury sparkling water company was founded by Mahy and his wife, Mindy, while on their honeymoon in New Zealand. The bottle is made of aluminum and includes a twist-off top, so consumers can re-seal their bottles in between sips.

Mahy was initially hesitant to start a bottled water company due to the negative environmental impact bottled water often has. Then, they found aluminum.

"One of the things that had really made me resist the idea [of starting the business] was the negative environmental aspects of bottled water," Mahy said. "When were in New Zealand, we started thinking about how to make our product in an honestly sustainable way. We came across aluminum as a material and packaging for the water, and very quickly realized that aluminum is a sustainability wonder material."

Aluminum is the most widely distributed and used metal in the world, and it is also the most common metal, composing about eight percent of the earth's crust, according to Jon Huls, a Recycling and Resource Management professor at Santa Monica College. On average, 68 percent of aluminum cans are recycled — the highest recycling rate of any resource, Huls said.

Plastic is strong, lightweight and resistant, but it has enabled the development of "innumerable disposable products," which has increased the amount of waste, he said. Although paper accounts for most of the trash in landfills by volume, plastics account for 25 percent of all waste in landfills when buried, according to Huls.

"In California alone, about a billion PET [a lightweight plastic] water bottles are discarded into landfills in spite of a 5- and 10- cent deposit on pint- and liter-sized containers," Huls told Patch.

Single-use plastic bottles have three common paths, according to a TED-Ed video by environmental journalist Emma Bryce. They can end up in a landfill where rainwater helps turn them into highly toxic leachate that makes its way into the groundwater, soil and streams. They can end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch after the ocean current captures plastic debris, where ocean animals often mistake the plastic for food and inevitably starve to death. Finally, they can be recycled with other plastics before they are melted into raw materials and turned into something new. However, less than 10 percent of plastic bottles are actually recycled, Huls said.

Aluminum isn’t a perfect material — there are negative impacts associated with every step of aluminum production, most notably is the greenhouse gas emissions, Huls said. However, a life cycle analysis of aluminum shows distinct advantages to recycling the material, including reduced energy consumption, according to Huls.

Aluminum also sells for $2,400 per ton for scrap, so it’s valuable, Mahy said. At recycling yards, Mahy said it is the first material they look for because it subsidizes recycling of all other materials.

"You can take one of our bottles, recycle it, and 60 days later it’ll be made into an airplane by Boeing or a Tesla car," Mahy said. "We’re not reinventing the wheel here, we’re creating a product that’s using materials that are already available."

The founders of KOPU chose not to use glass for packaging their water because it’s "unbelievably expensive" to recycle glass, Mahy said. "The market value of glass is $0 per ton, so it is a huge drain of resources" to recycle glass, he said.

However, glass shouldn’t be overlooked— especially for food and beverages from a health perspective, Huls said.

"Glass is mostly resistant to chemical attack, does not react with foods, and is an ideal material for the manufacture of containers for foodstuffs and most chemicals," he said. "Where it is recycled, glass has among the highest rates of recycling, often at 80 percent or better."

While the verdict is still out on what material makes the most sustainable packaging, one thing is for certain — KOPU Sparkling Water is more than your average water. It is sourced from the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand, which is where Mahy’s father is from. The luxury sparkling water is also rich in minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium and chloride, as well as silica, which is known as the “beauty mineral” for its hair, nail and skin enhancing properties.

Last year, at The Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting (which Mahy said is the “Academy Awards of bottled water”), KOPU was judged as one of the top three best sparkling waters in the world in a blind taste test.

"In terms of sparkling water, we wanted to create the champagne of sparkling water. We wanted tiny, fine champagne-like bubbles," Mahy said. "Because they’re so tiny, when you’re drinking it, it has a velvety experience to it. It’s not that harsh experience you get, like when you drink these sparkling waters on the market in cans."

The Shore Hotel and The Georgian in Santa Monica — both of which have "a tremendous amount of respect" for the environment, Mahy said — are now serving KOPU SparklingWater. Situated on Ocean Avenue, both hotels face the beach. It was important for both hotels to create a bottled water program that was sustainable for the planet and the environment, he said.

"When we provide KOPU Sparkling Water to customers, especially in hospitality, we can provide a zero-waste bottled water program where the aluminum will always be recycled so it’ll never end up in a landfill or the ocean," Mahy said. "On top of that, because our bottles are resealable, they’re more likely going to be used completely rather than wasted."

Learn more on the KOPU Sparkling Water website.