Whether you’ve been a fan of Aquagear since the inception or you’re just getting acquainted with our company and products, we hope it’s as clear to you as our water that our mission goes beyond creating affordable, effective home filters. With the support of our customers we created the Aquagear Foundation, which has handed out special bio-sand filters in rural Tanzania. Those filters remove bacteria, viruses, and protozoa from dirty water and turn it into clean, safe, drinking water for one of the most water-stressed countries on the planet1. We choose lightweight, durable materials for our packaging and offer complimentary filter recycling to ensure that we ‘walk the walk’ in our dedication to sustainability. Now we’re pleased to announced that we’ve taken another step in that walk: as of June 1, 2021, Aquagear is offsetting 100% of the carbon emissions from shipping our pitchers and filters, whether they are purchased directly from us or through Amazon.com.
Doing our part to try to reverse the effects of global warming – and to avoid contributing to its worsening - is something we think about a lot. Though we can’t yet eliminate all the carbon emissions involved in getting our products to your door, carbon neutral shipping lets us attack the least sustainable portion of the process — shipping.2 Committing to carbon neutral shipping is a multi-step process that required us to take a deep dive into exactly how much carbon is sent into the atmosphere when we ship our products. Then we identified sustainable development and climate cooling projects that matched our values and goals. That was the hardest part, as there are so many worthwhile campaigns.
After plenty of exploration and admiration, we identified the following programs that we love.
- Capricorn Ridge Wind Energy Center – Located in Coke County, Texas, this wind generation plan avoids an average of 160,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year while providing economic stimulus through landowner lease payments, employment of local staff, and allowing the land to remain in agricultural use – all without adding air or water pollution and without using water to generate energy.
- Gas capture projects in Pennsylvania and Ohio – Gas capture projects extract and capture waste methane from landfills and transform it into Renewable Natural Gas (RNG). It can then be dispensed in fueling stations for natural gas vehicles. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Capturing these emissions allows them to be used to generate sustainable energy and jobs.3
- Forestry growth/preservation in Arcata, California – The Arcata Community Forest is a redwood forest that boasts 790 acres of woodland dotted with bridges, stairways, ravines and hillsides. It is home to developed trails for hiking, horseback riding, and mountain biking, and is one of 20 forests in the country that have been designated “Model Forests” by the Forest Guild.4 The city of Arcata allows the public to purchase carbon offsets that grow trees on extended rotations and add forest acres that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.5
What all this means for you is that whenever you purchase one of Aquagear’s pitchers or filters you will not only receive one of the most effective and affordable home use water filters available, you will also be contributing to real-world efforts to reduce carbon emissions in our planet – at no additional cost.
At Aquagear we believe that businesses like ours have a responsibility to make a positive social and environmental impact at the same time that we make a great product. And we hope that knowing you’re helping us do good makes you feel even better about the great-tasting water our pitchers deliver.
- Water, sanitation, and hygiene. Retrieved from Unicef.org (ND)
- The environmental cost of shipping stuff is huge. Can we fix that? Retrieved from Vox.com (December 23, 2015)
- Basics Information about Landfill Gas. Retrieved from EPA.gov (ND)
- Arcata Community Forest. Retrieved from Humboldt California’s Redwood Coast (ND)
- Carbon Sequestration & Other. Retrieved from City of Arcata.org (ND)