Sustainability

We know we use plastics in our bottles and we are conscious about it.

First of all, our plastic is completely recyclable and food grade PET. There are multiple migration reports we rely on, which have established no transfer of plastic in your shot.

If you segregate dry waste in your household or workplace, there are very high chances that the plastic bottle will be recycled. Any bottles that you give away to the neighborhood recycler (raddiwala) inevitably reach a recycling plant.

We make our shot bottles heavy enough for the waste picker to make it worthwhile of her/his effort. While our individual shot bottle weighs more than 12gm, a 1 liter mineral water bottle could weigh as less as 4gm. India has a very high rate of plastic recycling and only the plastic which is littered and has less weight such as polyethylene bags, straws, wraps etc. are not picked up. The Govt also proposed plastic bags of more than 50 micron thickness, so as to incentivise collection.

We have received suggestions of moving to a glass bottle and we have been working on this but we realised two fundamental challenges with glass:

A glass bottle is more heavy than a plastic bottle, and therefore has a much larger transportation carbon footprint.
Plastic is easy to transport and can handle rugged logistics handling. You know how any e-commerce delivery reaches you.

Furthermore, it may surprise you that India recycles 60% of the plastic but only 45% of the glass. The non-recycled plastic is the one which is either thrown directly in the drains or is too light in weight (straws, thin films etc.) to be worthy of collection effort or the kinds which are damaged/unusable but kept in storage. India is neither the originator or a material contributor to the ocean plastic problem.

We have a customer buy-back program where you can also earn a 20% discount on your next purchase if you send us 30 or more bottles. We recycle as much as 600kg of customer returned plastic bottles every quarter through a certified recycling partner.

You can also use the cute little bottles for condiment storage, growing indoor plants, making a beautiful stand and what not! Your creativity has no limit. Please share any ideas you may have on our Instagram page and we will make sure all our customers get to know it.

With all this in mind, we still feel that we can do better and we have been experimenting and exploring alternatives. We will keep you posted. Feel free to share any ideas you may have with us at hello@akivalove.com with ‘Sustainability’ as the subject line.