AquAid & the Environment

What we do for the Environment

AquAid have always been at the forefront in the water cooler industry when it comes to caring for our planet and the people that inhabit it.

Our association over the years with Christian Aid and Pump Aid has enabled us to provide fresh drinking water for millions of people throughout the Third World. However, we have also long recognized the need to respect the world we live in, and the very real environmental damage that threatens this planet's existence.

With this in mind, we are continually striving to minimize any possible negative environmental impact that we, as a company, create. We have introduced a wide range of measures over the years to reduce our carbon emissions, thus substantially reducing our carbon footprint. A few of these initiatives are detailed below.

• We have considerably more distribution centres than any other water cooler company. This means that we are nearer to our customers, and therefore use far less diesel delivering our water, thus minimizing our carbon emissions.
• We are pro-active in informing our existing bottle-fed customers of the environmental benefits of switching over to mains-fed (Point-of-Use) machines which instead of using bottled water dispense high quality, purified mains water. The environmental benefits here are two-fold - firstly, fewer bottles are manufactured/processed at our bottling plant, thus reducing the emissions associated with bottle production/re-filling/re-cycling. Secondly, fewer deliveries/collections result in fewer carbon emissions being generated from our transport at every stage.
• Our bottles are made of a special, extremely durable plastic and are re-used. Once they have exhausted their "shelf-life" and cease to be re-usable, we then ensure that they are granulated and re-cycled in an ecologically-friendly manner and are not simply disposed of in land-fill sites.
• We take the same care with our coolers, which are disposed of in the most environmentally way possible. The coolers are dissembled, and the harmful freezing gas, that all water coolers have, is removed using the latest state-of the-art equipment.
• Our cups are made from recyclable materials, and can be recycled again due to the type of plastic from which they are made. Please contact us for further details about you can help the environment by recycling your plastic cups.
• We are currently experimenting with a paperless billing system in one of Branches (i.e. e-mailing invoices), and are looking to roll this method out throughout our entire network in the near future. This will substantially reduce the carbon-footprint of our administration departments.
• The water cooler industry uses many thousand sheets of delivery-note paper every day - it is our hope that we at AquAid, with our current trials of electronic hand-held devices, will be able to further reduce our share of the burden on the environment, which is caused by this excessive paper.

In conclusion, you may rest assured that we at AquAid are striving to address the very challenging issue of climate change, and are taking every possible opportunity to re-evaluate and, wherever possible, improve our methods of operation in this regard.

The steps we have already taken, and those which we will take in the future, will indisputably reduce our carbon emissions.

If, as suppliers and consumers, we all do the very best we can in this regard, then we may have some chance of halting the large-scale destruction of our planet in years to come. In this technology-based world, it is virtually impossible to become "truly" carbon neutral. However, we promise that at AquAid we are concentrating all our efforts and resources in minimising any damaging effects our business has on the environment, whilst continuing to balance this with our on-going commitment through Christian Aid and Pump Aid of providing fresh clean drinking water for our world's poorest and most deprived people.