The story of Brita began in 1966, when the company’s founder, Heinz Hankammer, had a vision of improving the efficiency of the mains water supply. But the brand’s real success started in the early 1970s when they released a water filter jug meant to get utilized in the home. Essentially, the magical carafe eliminates all the nasty stuff from your tap water and turns it into something clean and drinkable. If you had bad tap water in the 80s or 90s—and, yes, even today—you most likely still have one in your fridge. Today, they’re a market-leading water filtration systems provider that won a silver Green Apple award for Environmental Best Practice in 2019 for its sustainability practices.
To extend that vision, the company launched a premium purified water in early 2021, a replacement for single-use plastic challenging the more than $283 billion bottled water market. Today, the world produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 million tons of plastic yearly, and at least 14 million will get dumped into our oceans in that same span of time. Add to that the 1.2 million plastic bottles produced every minute, where 91% of it does not get recycled, and you start to get the picture.