04 | 2010

Bottle Applications
The Ritz-Carlton goes Prima
Prima Water - wait a minute - bioplastics MAGAZINE reported about
Primo Water from Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 2008 and 2009
… but Prima?
Well, yes, they have changed their brand to Prima mainly to separate the
business and the communication from their 3 and 5 gallon water bottles and
water cooler products. So Prima can now focus their brand communication
against its very distinct and unique product attribute of the bottle being made
from renewable and sustainable plants, (Ingeo PLA), not petroleum like
PET, a depleting and non-renewable resource.
Success
“Our business is growing very nicely, with strong double digit sales
increases,“ said Tim Ronan, VP Marketing & Sales at Prima, to bioplastics
MAGAZINE. “We have added terrific new retail partners, for instance nationwide
2,200 Kroger stores, 95 Fresh Market stores, 200 Ingles and 350 Wilco/Hess
convenience stores.“
Just recently, Prima was named the bottled water of choice for all of The
Ritz-Carlton Hotel properties in North America and Caribbean (more details
below).
In addition to the 16 ounce bottles Prima just introduced a new 20 ounce
bottle for the convenience and foodservice channels. As the pricing is very
competitive, (e.g. $4.99 for a 24 pack), consumers don’t have to sacrifice
economically to do something good for the environment.
End of life
Being asked for the end-of-life scenario of Prima PLA bottles, Tim Ronan
explained that their focus has always started with the beginning of life;
using a natural, sustainable and renewable material; not oil based resins.
The options for end of life recovery remain the same. The Prima bottle
can be recycled, commercially composted and incinerated. Tim believes
that most consumers are using their local recycling systems today but the
use or interest in composting continues to grow, especially with colleges,
universities and restaurants. Actually, Prima is the only beverage bottle of
any kind in the US certified by the Biodegradable Plastics Institute (BPI) as
meeting all ASTM guidelines for compostability. All PLA-based bottles can be
sorted using NIR (Near-Infrared) equipment. Sorting PLA has been proven
on several occasions. As described in bM Issue 04/2009 Prima has taken an
extra step of blending a UV detectable, food safe dye into PLA that allows
the Prima bottle to actually ‘glow‘ a purple color under a simple low wattage
black light. This allows for an economical way to manually sort Prima if a
recycler does not have NIR equipment.
And then there is BioCor, announced in March with Mike Centers as the
Managing Director and a mission to buy both consumer and industrial PLA
materials from recyclers and manufacturers. There is a program in place
where recyclers can collect and be paid a competitive rate for PLA bottles/
materials. Those collected materials will be sent to a contracted facility that
will hydrolyze the materials back to 100% pure lactic acid, which will then be
22 bioplastics MAGAZINE [04/10] Vol. 5