any Honest Tea collected and recycled 108,704 containers at Great Recycle events held throughout the country during Earth Month this past April 2014—an increase of 212% from the amount collected at events during Earth Month 2013. Over the course of the month, the Great Recycle tour covered the Washington, D.C. metro area, New York City, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, and Missouri.
One 30-foot tall and six 12-foot tall recycling bins were set up throughout the country at grocery stores, college campuses and environmental events to generate excitement and enthusiasm for recycling. At each stop recyclers were educated about the importance of recycling and rewarded for on-site exchanges of empty glass, plastic, and aluminum containers.
“We’ve still got a long way to go to getting national recycling rates up above 30% for plastic bottles,” says Honest Tea’s Co-Founder & TeaEO Seth Goldman, “but we’re proud to be a part of the solution, one tour stop at a time and one bottle at a time.”
For the Great Recycle Earth Month tour, Honest Tea partnered with retailers including Duane Reade, GIANT, and The Kroger Co., as well as college campuses including Virginia Tech, East Carolina University, North Carolina State University, Clemson University, University of San Diego, and University of Southern California.
Participants exchanged empty containers for various rewards, including the option of sponsoring the planting of trees in developing communities around the world via agroforestry non-profit Trees for the Future. A one-day record was set in NYC at the Earth Day New York festival with 18,157 containers collected and recycled, the largest single-day collection in the three years of the recycling tour.
Started in 2012, the Great Recycle is part of Honest Tea’s ongoing efforts to reduce its environmental footprint.
· Honest Tea was a founding member of the Drink Pouch Brigade®, a program launched in 2007 with TerraCycle® to recycle and ‘upcycle’ drink pouches. The program has collected more than 182 million drink pouches.
· Honest Tea light-weighted its current plastic bottles in 2009, using 22% less plastic than previous versions.
· In 2011, the company reduced the amount of cardboard used in its Honest Kids cartons by 0.56 oz. That change resulted in a conservation of approximately 1.7 million pounds of material in the past three years.
To date, the Great Recycle tour has traveled to 16 states and the District of Columbia, and collected more than 275,000 containers. This summer it will continue with events already scheduled in Seattle, San Francisco, and at select Whole Foods Market® locations in Chicago.
