Charleston Post & Courier - Businesses think outside the bottle

By Allyson Byrd

Go green. Reduce your carbon footprint.

Boycott bottled water?

Just a couple of years ago, bottled water seemed so much smarter than soda. But while it may be healthier than other soft drinks, bottled water generates just as much plastic waste. And at $1 a pop or more for the average customer, it's expensive.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in Miami late last month, voted to phase bottled water out of local governments and use municipal water instead. But some Earth-conscious Charleston businesses are a step ahead of the country's mayors.

The Sprout on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard has never sold bottled water to its diners since it opened a little more than a year ago. Instead, the health-food restaurant offers filtered tap water for 50 cents. The price tag, according to Sprout employee Cameron Read, comes from the cost of the plastic cups. They're made from corn and are biodegradable, albeit a little messy if they get too hot.

And Charleston Battery fans might have noticed this season that the concession stands give water away, but not in bottles.

Battery President Andrew Bell said the soccer team saw a wrong in selling a resource that should be free. And handing out water in plastic cups, which are then recycled, fits with the Battery's efforts over the past nine months to reduce energy use, he said.

Though he didn't cite exact figures, Bell estimated the Battery took a sales hit by cutting bottled water. Even so, he said, "Just the thought of bringing water in from where they manufacture it — Atlanta or New York — didn't make a lot of sense to us."

But Murray Compton would contend that the bottle backlash hurts the local guy, too. Sitting in his North Charleston office, he received an e-mail from his trade organization, the International Bottled Water Association, soon after the Conference of Mayors passed its resolution.

A former Coca-Cola executive, Compton launched Appalachian Springs from his home around the time Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989. Silver-haired and soft-spoken, Compton quips that it was "a bad time to live on Sullivan's

Island, but a good time to be in the bottled water business.

"Back then his wife, Cindy, the company's vice president of operations and administration, delivered the water with the family minivan. Appalachian Springs has since doubled its sales volume about every four years, Compton said, and now has a few thousand customers, including some of the area's most upscale establishments.

The movement away from bottled water hasn't hit Appalachian Springs, Compton said.

"Our business is really good," he said. "I don't know what to attribute that to except we've got really good people, but I brought most of them up." His daughters run the sales department, and his son manages another branch of the company. They hold strategy meetings at the family beach house.

But for a small operation, the Compton clan also didn't ignore the emerging eco-awareness.

In 2002 they introduced bottle-less technology, antibacterial filtration systems that people can lease in place of traditional water coolers with plastic bottles. And Appalachian Springs soon will reduce its personal-size bottle to 12 grams of plastic from 24 grams and offer a sterile bag that fits into coolers and collapses into a small wad, Compton said.

On one wall of his office hangs an enlarged photograph of a cypress swamp and on the other a map of Appalachian Springs' "carbon footprint" — the measurement of its environmental impact versus its competitors. Appalachian Springs' is smaller, according to the poster.

Frustrated by the resolution against bottled water from the Conference of Mayors, Compton said, "The ultimate irony to me is that it's highly recyclable."

Charleston County recycled nearly 559 tons of plastic bottles, from water and other drinks, between January and May of this year, generating more than $211,000 in sales of recycled product. That's more revenue than all of last year. Yet little more than 35 percent of the county population recycles, according to Gregg Varner, solid waste director.

Returning from the mayors' conference, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley called reducing plastic bottles a small step toward decreasing waste in an area where high-quality tap water costs less than a penny per gallon.

"The city of Charleston buys very little bottled water," Riley said in a statement.

City work crews already use large water containers in place of individual bottles. Riley said Charleston also would look to offer alternatives to bottled water at city functions.

Gigi Kellett, a College of Charleston graduate who now heads up Think Outside the Bottle, a Boston-based advocacy group affiliated with Corporate Accountability International, traveled to Miami to lobby for the mayors' resolution.

"Tap water is what's really best for the environment, pocketbooks and access to a natural resource," she said after the vote.

But Compton hopes consumers will remember something else amid the flurry of publicity: "All the bad press we've gotten lately ignores the fact that it is a good, safe, healthy alternative."

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