Alanna Turpin knew telling employees at her company to start drinking tap water would be controversial, but she did not bank on how much resistance the 400 workers would put up.
The sustainability manager at Omnicom Media Group in Dubai Media City had to convince them the water was safe to drink by hiring technicians to test it.
And if any employees still needed persuading, a trip to poverty stricken villages in India and the Philippines to build water filtering tanks in March – where they saw women walking for five hours for water from contaminated wells – did the trick.
“We knew we had a big task so we had a water awareness campaign to educate people not just on water conservation, but on plastic,” Ms Turpin said.
“We managed to convert quite a few people, but they did not want to drink tap water.”
The marketing and communications company used between 12,000 and 15,000 plastic water bottles a month and 85 five-gallon bottles for coolers, so something had to change.
“We were searching for a sustainable alternative for some time,” Ms Turpin said.
“We knew this was the right switch and would be better for everyone’s health and the environment.”
The pay-off has been huge in savings for the environment and business costs. It is saving 30 per cent on what it was spending on plastic bottles.
Within two years, that saving will be 90 per cent of what it used to spend on bottled water, as the company will be paying only to maintain its filtration system.
Omnicom has also paired up with Goumbook to plant 1,213 ghaf trees in the UAE. That will offset carbon emissions equal to those created by its previous plastic bottle use, or equal to nearly 100,000 plastic bottles.
Fourteen companies have signed up to Goumbook’s Drop It campaign, which aims to change consumer habits and cut down on plastic waste.
Since it was launched a year ago, the initiative has stopped the use of 225,347 half-litre water bottles, 4,446 five-gallon bottles, campaign founders said.
“You cannot recycle plastic forever,” said Lamis Harib, co-founder of Ecabiotec in Dubai. “At some point you have to burn it or dump it.”
When Ms Harib set up her company four years ago, she was shocked to discover she was the first to investigate alternatives to plastic packaging and products.
“It was a huge red flag that in 2013, a small local business was pioneering local effort to find and manufacture alternatives to bioplastics.”
Last week at a Federal National Council session, Dubai member Hamad Al Rahoomi asked the Minister of Climate Change and Environment, Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi, why a 2009 initiative to make the UAE free of plastic bags by 2013 had failed.
The minister admitted the UAE used 13 billion bags a year – an average of about 1,500 bags a person a year – but said it was the responsibility of society to work towards a solution.
In the meantime, Drop It aims to educate companies.
For a US$1,000 (Dh3,672.5) annual fee, it gives pointers on how to be more sustainable, and employees receive discounts for installing filtered water systems at home.
Linda Merieau, director of Surge, said a pair of jeans used 7,000 litres of water in production, while a chocolate bar used 2,400 litres. The average cup of coffee takes 140 litres to produce, when the cost of growing the beans and making the cup are factored in.
“Ninety per cent of our water footprint comes from hidden water sources we are simply not thinking about,” she said.
newsdesk@thenational.ae
