Bevi releases inaugural sustainability report

Bevi, a Boston-based developer of smart water coolers for commercial spaces, has released its inaugural sustainability report, outlining the effect of plastic bottles on the environment, its recent sustainability achievements and its goals to eliminate the use of plastic bottles.

The report claims Bevi has replaced and prevented over 500 million single-use bottles and cans from entering the global waste stream since the company’s inception in 2013. Bevi's goal is to save over 1 billion bottles from entering the environment by 2025.

The company says 600 billion plastic water bottles and containers are sold each year, with each taking more than 400 years to biodegrade. In 2023 alone, Bevi says 86 percent of plastic bottles ended up in landfills as U.S. recycling rates decreased.

“Not only is a plastic bottle itself harmful for the environment but getting that bottle from factory to fridge also generates 78.9 [grams] of CO₂, making the global annual carbon footprint of bottled water equivalent to the amount emitted by over 10 million cars," Bevi says in a news release announcing its report.

Citing a recent study conducted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Bevi says 240,000 detectable plastic fragments were found per liter of bottled water, adding that its smart water coolers offer premium filtration to remove microplastics from water as an alternative to plastic bottles.

The company’s 2024 impact report shares the recent milestones Bevi has hit, as well as its future outlook, including:

• 500 million bottles and cans replaced;
• the company donating refurbished Bevi machines to schools, nonprofits and other community organizations in the Boston area; and
• the goal to replace over 1 billion bottles by 2025, which it is halfway towards.

“The beverage industry is incredibly wasteful, with some of the world’s largest beverage companies contributing the most to plastic pollution,” Bevi co-founder and CEO Sean Grundy says. “My co-founders and I started Bevi 10 years ago because we wanted to transform the beverage industry from the inside. We believe that people shouldn’t have to choose between sustainability and convenience, and we are excited to be building a new, bottle-free supply chain for beverages.

“We are thankful for the thousands of corporate customers who have partnered with Bevi to replace refrigerators full of bottled beverages with machines that offer a wide variety of beverages without single-use containers.”