By Will Novosedlik

On a global scale, the beverage industry puts over 500 billion plastic bottles on the shelf every year. According to a study by German specialist media house WEKA, the two largest beverage companies are also ranked as the world’s top plastic polluters for the 5th consecutive year. Break Free From Plastic, a worldwide movement against plastic pollution, in its latest global brand audit report, charges those same leading plastic polluters for fuelling the climate crisis.

As a consequence of all this plastic pollution, the equivalent of two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic – about 30 tons – is dumped into the oceans every minute. And by 2050, it is estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than biomass.

We tend to think of plastic waste as spent containers floating in the ocean or littering our beaches, but the reality is that plastic never goes away – it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, allowing it to permeate the environment and every living thing on earth at a microscopic level. In his recent book about plastic pollution entitled A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and our Bodies, WIRED writer Matt Simon points out that plastic can be found from the bottom of the Mariana trench to the top of Mt. Everest.

Despite these figures and this knowledge, plastic production is still expected to triple by 2060.

To bring our attention to these alarming facts, Toronto-based organic beverage maker Greenhouse Juice Co. recently launched its new digital platform The Glass House Project (only viewable on mobile and focusing entirely on sharing facts about the impact of plastic pollution) and its 99.9% plastic-free packaging. The new format features aluminum caps and 100% post-consumer waste (PCW), plastic-free labels. This makes the brand the first in this space on Canadian grocery shelves to be certified plastic neutral by rePurpose, a leading plastic action platform. That means that for all the plastic currently remaining in its supply chain, it removes the equivalent amount from the natural environment.

The brand has been bottling its plant-based beverages in reusable glass since opening its doors in 2014 – a commitment that has avoided an estimated 158,000 kg of plastic waste in 2023 alone. Its more recently launched sparkling water comes in aluminum cans.

“Our industry is trashing the planet, and this has become normalized”, says Greenhouse founder Anthony Green. “We’re tiny by comparison (to the big polluters), but we’ve always striven to do things differently, and we want to show our fellow beverage companies and consumers that alternatives do exist. With the launch of The Glass House Project, we’re taking our commitment to sustainability one step further. We’re setting out to break up the industry’s toxic relationship with plastic, raise awareness about microplastics and plastic pollution, and drive meaningful change.”

Greenhouse has shown that Canadian consumers are onside. The business has grown at a rate of 25-30% each year for the last 10 years. “We’re in most grocery stores across Canada now, such as Whole Foods, Loblaw and Sobeys,” Green shares, “You’ll find us in the produce section. We’re in about 1200 points of distribution. ” Greenhouse just started shipping to the U.S., where its products can be found in Fresh Market stores up and down the East Coast.

When asked how the product is marketed, he replies, “We don’t put a whole lot of dollars into marketing. We really are about distribution and word of mouth.” Which is astonishing considering the brand’s continual growth.

The beverage company is also recognized for its unique sustainability impact and initiatives, recently having been announced as a winner of the 2023 Canadian Grocery Award and, earlier, Sobeys’ 2022 Local Supplier Sustainability Award recipient.

While happy with these results, Green has bigger ambitions. “I want to be able to start quantifying for our customers, the retailers, how much the consumer cares about this cause and that there is an opportunity for reuse. We need our distributors and our retailers to buy into the reuse model. We need the bottles to move back through the system as they do at the beer stores and the LCBO,” he says. “But that’s a supply chain overhaul and it’s going to require some work.”