Earth Day reveals the world’s first plant-based and customizable water bottles

LONDON - April 27, 2015 - PRLog -- Single-use packaging is convenient. It’s been around for decades and it was easy to get used to. The problem most couldn’t foresee at the beginning was the incredible volume of waste all the packaging would create. Bottled water is good example of such troublesome convenience: globally, 300 000 000 000 litres of bottled water were consumed in 2014. That resulted in 647 000 tonnes of plastic waste.

A startup company from Europe decided to reduce this plastic pollution. They came up with a new exciting refillable bottle and a supporting business model to make tap water more appealing to consumers: “There already are some nice water bottles around but we were really missing something fashionable, something to meet the needs of millenials,” says Zuzana Cabejskova, the founder of ZAZA Planet.

Cabejskova has long been involved in the topic of sustainable hydration. She started an NGO called Czech The Tap in 2010 to promote tap water among Czech restaurants and citizes. “It was pretty unusual for waiters to serve tap water. Nowadays, guests can ask for a glass almost anywhere.” Cabejskova adds that the NGO’s blind-tasting experiments were also a success: “Over 2 thousand people participated and 80% couldn’t tell the difference between tap and bottled water.”

If tap water tastes good, why is it still looked down upon? Cabejskova realized it was due to lack of appeal. “Tap water is kind of grey and boring, there is no story to it.” Working on this assumption, Zuzana and fellow students from TU Delft in The Netherlands came up with the concept of ZAZA: customizable and plant-based bottles. The idea won the main award of a national StartUP! Contest in 2013 and has evolved for the past two years. Today, it’s up on Kickstarter.

Several renowned artist have joined the crowdfunding effort by creating special limited editions of the bottles’ exchangeable covers: John Malloy as FluX from US, Maria Grønlund from Denmark, Marion Girerd as Lilidoll from France and others. “Our goal is to make tap water a stylish drink and putting art on it is a way to do that. Simply put, we’re hoping that people will enjoy drinking from ZAZA so much that they won’t need single-use plastic anymore,” explains Lucia Mackovicova, the marketeer of ZAZA Planet.

To further support the popularity of tap water, the startup promises to devote half of their profit to the construction of public drinking fountains in developed countries.

Earth Day marks the soft launch of their Kickstarter campaign. You can preview and comment here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zaza-bottles/1880926.... The campaign will officially begin on 20th of May. If successful, first owners should get their own bottle before Christmas 2015.