“It just became very clear that the reason we have a problem with plastic pollution is convenience, and trying to change that delivery mechanism is going to be very difficult,”says Alex Totterman, founder of new bottled water company Cove . “And we don’t really have time. We’re looking at probably less than 30 years and we’ll have an ocean filled with more plastic than fish. While cleanup efforts are really important, we also just need to stop the amount of plastic going into our environment, especially single-use plastic.” So Cove, which is launching later this month, is packaged in a bottle made from a biopolymer called PHA. If the bottle ends up in a compost bin or landfill–or even the ocean–it will fully biodegrade. “For the last two years, we’ve been working on really providing a direct alternative to the single-use plastic bottle,” says Totterman. He previously worked at a nanotechnology company on water purification, and had initially considered making a filter that people would use at home. But he realized that wouldn’t solve the problem. [Photo: Sergiy Barchuk/Cove] PHA, which is made by bacteria through a fermentation process, isn’t new, but it’s only recently become economical to produce. […]
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