Tackling plastic bottles – one sip at a time
Single-use plastic has been in the news a lot and for us at RWH, offering walking holidays in sometimes remote places, bottled water seemed the easiest source of safe drinking water for our groups. Unfortunately, destinations that rely on bottled water are left with vast amounts of plastic waste that is either sent to landfill or strewn about the countryside so, RWH decided to make a stand and offer our travellers a way to avoid adding to the plastic mountains.
Partnering with UK company Water to Go has enabled us to offer our clients an alternative to single use bottles. Our aim was to sell 1000 of the filtered water drinking bottles by the end of 2018. We achieved this, and more, with +/- 1300 bottles sold. While we may not be able to directly influence specific country’s recycling programmes, we are able to influence the amount of plastic waste. We are hugely proud of this achievement.
Water to Go kindly offered to match the client discount with a donation to our staff charity Heart & Sole. We have used the £2000 donated to support projects around the world such as Toilet Twinning, a school breakfast club in the Caribbean and foster homes in San Juan, Costa Rica.
What made our pledge a real success was using all of our communication resources to tell as many clients and journalists as possible about our cooperation. We include information on the bottles with details on how to book and how to obtain our special discount in our client documentation, in leaflets distributed with over 80,000 brochures, at tradeshows, on our website, on Facebook and Twitter posts.