As the owner let me say thank you for visiting our site.  I hope you will visit again and tell your friends to visit.  Since 1990 we have promoted proprietary products and developed new products that reduces or eliminates the packaging waste associated with the consumption of soft drinks through the use of concentrates while saving the customer money. 

Prior to the 1970's beverages were consumed in returnable and reusable containers.  Then in the name of convenience the reusable containers gave way to disposable containers.  These disposable containers ended up in our landfills, in garbage incinerators and yes even in lakes and streams and along our roadsides.  Years of this disposable convenience created a major pollution problem no matter how the containers were disposed of.  A solution was needed and a solution was provided.  Recycling to the rescue!  But is recycling really the solution?   

In the 1980's and into the early 1990's everyone was recycling and thought recycling was going to be the solution to the pollution associated with our waste, waste reduction was not even a public issue.  Consumers see the chasing arrows and the word "recyclable" on the bottom of the plastic bottles they buy and they assume that most of these bottles are recycled.  In reality only 780 million pounds of plastic bottles were recycled in The US in 2002 out of more than 4 billion pounds sold, or 1 out of every 5 bottles.  By the middle of the 1990's the amount of waste created per capita had increased dramatically while recycling rates declined. 

Between then and now, some important and notable happenings happened:

1. The Berkeley Ecology Center's Plastics Task Force reported that it seems that recycling gives manufacturers a license to produce more waste, but it is OK to produce waste as long as it is recyclable, they think.  
2. The Grass Roots Recycling Network report "Wasting and Recycling in the U.S. 2000" indicates that between 1990 and 1997 plastic packaging grew five times faster by weight than plastic recovered for recycling.  
3. This notion of recycling has made producing, recycling, and transporting recyclable packaging an extremely profitable industry.  A huge amount of packaging is being produced, recycled, and transported.  There seems to be no incentive to focus on ways to reduce, reuse, and eliminate this packaging.  The amount of this packaging increases every year as advertising promotes the purchase of products utilizing this packaging.  With the huge quantities of this packaging being created it has become a major pollution problem.  The problem continues to grow.
4. A lot of attention gets focused on the problem while almost no attention gets focused on the real solution.  Yet the real solution to this growing problem was discovered over 12 years ago by the prestigious Boston based Tellus Research Institute.  They were commissioned to conduct a 2-year study that would show how beneficial recycling is for the environment.  As a result of this study they concluded, "recycling does not appear to be the solution, but light weighting and concentration is."  They pointed out that some of the environmental cost of recycling waste are the consumption of precious resources, energy costs, and unwanted by products, as well as the contribution to water and air pollution caused by emissions from production and transportation of these products and other pollution due to chemical waste and sewage treatment requirements not to even mention all the human medical trauma this pollution causes.
5. Today people realize that even if we could recycle 100% of our waste, recycling the waste does not equal zero waste and zero environmental impact.  Only reducing and eliminating the waste equals zero waste and zero environmental impact.  Recycling simply creates less pollution than putting the waste in landfills or incinerating it while providing a license to produce more pollution causing waste.   

None of the environmental cost for this waste (recycled or not) is factored into the price of a product when purchased by the consumer.  Policy makers at all levels of government are starting to realize the mounting damage being done by the proliferation of needless packaging materials disposed of in the process of consuming soft drinks!  Recycling is not a solution to the pollution problem; it is a pollution problem providing merely an improvement to the problem while still causing pollution.  When one considers that this improvement to the problem provides a license to make the problem even bigger (produce more waste) instead of focusing on ways to eliminate the problem, then this improvement to the problem becomes the problem and becomes a license to pollute.  When it comes to helping the environment, the best one can do is to eliminate the packaging all together.

Since the 1970's the ruling paradigm says that we can manage waste safely by recycling it.  Recycling has failed us and the solution to the pollution caused by our trash is to re-use it, reduce it, and eliminating it, by light weighting it, and concentrating it. 

Zero Waste is getting a lot of attention.  For myself, zero waste is about challenging the ruling paradigm that says we can manage waste safely by recycling it instead of re-using it, reducing it, and eliminating it, by light weighting it, and concentrating it.  Recycling the waste minimizes the cost to our environment over disposing of the waste in landfills and incinerators but with so much waste to recycle it is a major pollution problem.  Reducing and eliminating the waste has NO impact on our environment.  To quote Brenda Platt of the Washington-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, "the key is to stop thinking about waste as a problem and to start thinking about it as an opportunity—in effect, from waste to wealth."

In 1990 my wife and I stopped thinking about waste as a problem and found the opportunity in it.  Since 1990 our customers have been making a BIG difference by doing the right thing and eliminating disposable cans and bottles while saving themselves money and enjoying our refreshing beverage concentrates and equipment.