Can you see what’s missing from this water bottle?
I spotted this at a 7-Eleven in Thailand, and it took me a moment to realize it has no plastic label!
The brand name - Sprinkle - is moulded directly into the bottle, and the barcode is printed on the cap.
It looks like a small detail, but across millions of bottles, it probably means that a surprising amount of material never reaches a landfill site.
Sprinkle’s main business is filtered water delivery (think office water coolers), but even though single-use bottles get a bad rap, this idea is pretty smart, and I hope it catches on.
In my last post, I looked at recycling bottle caps. This feels like the step before that, designing some of the waste out before it even exists.
We often focus on what happens after something is thrown away. But maybe the bigger opportunity is earlier, at the design stage.
Are these small design decisions where real circularity actually begins?
