Globelet lifts its sights from music festivals to cities
Imagine a world without disposable drink bottles. The oceans would be cleaner, emissions would be down, and landfills would fill at a far slower rate.
New Zealand entrepreneur Ryan Everton is doing more than imagining it. His Globelet reusable cups have graced festivals for three years, but the future is not cups, it’s bottles.
Auckland’s Splore festival early next month will see the first use of Globelet’s new washable, reusable bottles.
Festivals are renowned for consuming large numbers of disposable cups and bottles.
One beer keg on average uses 120 disposable cups, Globelet estimates. A festival that uses 100 barrels of beer can end up using 12,000 disposable cups.
At festivals served by Globelet, instead of getting a new disposable cup for every drink they buy, festival-goers buy festival-branded Globelet cups, refilling them again and again.
When they are done, they return them, and get their cup bond back. The cup can then be washed, and sold to the next thirsty festival-goer, though eight in 10 people keep them and take them home as souvenirs.
Everton believes Globelet prevents about 150 tonnes of disposable containers ending up in landfill every year, but he’s dreaming of having a bigger impact.
A festival is like a mini-city, he says, so the logical next step is to spread Globelet to actual cities, and in cities it is reusable, washable bottles that are the key.
By the year’s end, Everton hopes to have named three Globelet cities, where the likes of stadiums, cafes, and petrol stations all happily refill people’s bottles.
At the festivals there are systems to sell, fill, collect and reuse Globelet cups. Globelet cities will have to have those systems, including its own dispensing machines, on a much larger scale.
The city model would see consumers buy their cups and bottles and reuse them repeatedly, hence the bottles’ easy-to-wash design.
When consumers no longer want them, they can return them (getting a little money back) for Globelet to either wash and sell on to the next person or recycle into new bottles.
Everton says some cities have already taken a step towards ending the use of disposables, with Paris and San Francisco putting bans on some items such disposable drink bottles.
But Globelet’s plan isn’t to try to persuade city lawmakers to smooth the way by banning disposables. It’s to win businesses over by hard economics.
Businesses such as petrol stations and cafes will still be selling drinks – just not in plastic bottles, which are bulky and have to be displayed on shelves.
Globelet has developed its own drink dispensers, which allow for drinks such as sparkling water to be sold, but all will provide tap water free of charge for folks who do not want to spend money.
Bottles are not going to be the end of the journey. All food-related disposables (think coffee cups, fast food containers, and so on) are ripe for replacement with reusables.
The scale of Everton’s ambition has attracted Kiwi businesswoman Linda Jenkinson to join the company. Jenkinson was the first woman to list a company on the Nasdaq, and was twice named San Francisco’s most influential woman. The aim is to build Globelet into a global company.
Everton believes people want to reduce their waste footprint, and does not blame them for being trapped into the disposable consumer culture.
‘‘It’s the system that’s broken, and the products that are broken, not the humans,’’ Everton says.