Skip to main content

Message in the Bottle

Finally getting around to commenting on this old WSJ article. Think back 15 or 20 years and the idea of buying tap water in a bottle (except for sparkling water) would have seemed pretty ridiculous. But that's exactly what most people do these days. To put just how ridiculous that is in perspective, I did a few back-of-hand calculations based on the following paragraph from the article:


Coca-Cola Co., with a 36% share of the $106 billion-a-year U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage business, says it plans to build a plant that will be able to recycle as many as two billion 20-ounce bottles a year. Atlanta-based Coke won't say exactly where the plant will be located or when it will open. The company already has invested $41 million to build recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. But the move reflects a wider push by Coke to boost the amount of recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10%, up from just under 5% in 2006.
So, Coke was recycling 5% of it's U.S. bottles. And the new plant will be able to recycle as many as 2 Billion 20-ounce bottles a year. And that additional capacity would represent an additional 5% of its bottles. So, 10% = 4 billion bottles. And 100% = 40 billion bottles. And they have a 36% market share. So multiply that by roughly 3 and you get 120 billion 20-ounce plastic bottles. And that's just in the U.S. That number is pretty crazy. All of those aren't bottled water of course. A lot of that is soda. But here's the excerpt that reveals the market share of bottled water:
One big reason why beverage marketers are mounting a counterattack is that bottled water is widely seen as part of the answer to the soda sales slump. Bottled water has just a 17% U.S. market share, compared with 66% for sodas, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication. But bottled-water volume rose 11% in the first half of 2007. Soda volume decreased 5.9%.

So bottled water accounts for 17% of that 120 billion bottles, or roughly a fifth which would be around 24 billion bottles. There are approximately 300 million Americans. So that's about 80 bottles per year per American (including babies). And the article further states that only 23% of PET bottles are actually recycled. So that means the average American drops about 60 water bottles into the trash (instead of the recycling bin) every year. Crazy.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
3 comments
Read more

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history.  But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are.  The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile.  This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...
Post a Comment
Read more