When we founded I·DO Bio, one of the first questions we faced was: glass or PET? At first glance, glass seemed like the more environmentally friendly and appealing option. We initially wanted to establish I·DO Bio as a juice bar, modeled after the fantastic juice bars in my hometown of New York. In that case, glass would have been the obvious choice.
Ultimately, we decided to bring our cold-pressed and unpasteurized juices directly to your home via our express delivery service, as well as through restaurants and retailers. And suddenly, we had to reconsider our decision between glass and PET packaging. We reviewed numerous studies and came across results that even surprised some of us:
- Firstly, PET bottles are generally superior to glass bottles in terms of overall environmental impact. The energy required for production, cleaning, and recycling is greater for glass bottles. Furthermore, due to their higher weight, glass bottles are less environmentally friendly during transport. Since we ship our juices throughout Germany, the increased weight would ultimately lead to higher fuel consumption.
- Much of the bad reputation of plastic bottles stems from earlier generations of plastic bottles. Today's PET bottles contain neither bisphenol A nor other plasticizers (phthalates) and are therefore considered safe, for example by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). Furthermore, since our products are never heated, the risk of interactions with the PET is particularly low.
- Secondly, only the use of plastic bottles allows us to preserve our juices using the gentle HPP process. Without this, it would inevitably lead to juice being thrown away, wasting valuable organic produce. This is because there would always be times when juice, whether on our shelves, in the store, or in your refrigerator, would exceed its shelf life and become unusable.
With maximum sustainability and customer convenience in mind, we have therefore opted for PET bottles. While PET bottle recycling isn't ideal, significant progress has been made in recent years. We contribute to recycling by participating in the dual system "Green Dot." PET bottles are reused in the recycling process, either to manufacture new bottles or to produce textile fibers. If you don't have a use for our bottles, please always dispose of them correctly, for example, in the yellow recycling bag or bin. This ensures that the raw materials used are recycled as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, we have been working on switching to bio-PET for some time now. More information will be available soon.
In a perfect world, glass would be lighter and less resource-intensive to produce than PET, and I wouldn't have to write this post. Unfortunately, that's not the case, and we had to compromise on our packaging. This is the only way we can deliver our cold-pressed and unpasteurized organic juices to you in the most environmentally friendly way possible. And that's without heating and without adding synthetic waste.
With this in mind - Juice responsibly and stay fresh,
— Alex
