Is your water in Paris still or sparkling? For the first time, a company has been authorised to bottle water in the capital. Optimised filtration, designer returnable glass bottle: BE WTR is targeting hotels and palaces that wish to limit plastic and consume locally.
In its 300-square-metre warehouse in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, which will open on Wednesday, the Swiss water brand has just started production on its automated bottling line where bottles gently collide to be filled and then closed with a capsule.
Chlorine and contaminating metals are filtered.
“While the city of Paris processes millions and millions of litres at a very high speed, we have much less volume and therefore a longer contact time with our specific filters which allow us to remove even more things and perfect the taste of the water,” summarises Jonathan McNicol, managing director of BE WTR in France.
In addition to “pesticide residues and PFAS (perpetual contaminants, editor’s note) of which we can still find traces in the water from the network” – without exceeding the regulatory thresholds – “chlorine and polluting metals” are also filtered, which gives a better taste, silkier and smoother. There is a real difference with tap water. We have a raw material that is very good and that we promote,” he says.
The Lausanne-based company is the first to have obtained authorisation from the prefecture to bottle Paris water from underground sources.
It has invested one million euros in its Paris headquarters, which can produce up to six million bottles a year, and counts several players in the hotel sector among its first clients, including the Paris giant Accor. “We pay for our cubic metre of water like everyone else and there is no additional tax for bottling this water,” explains Jonathan McNicol.
Bottle reusable more than 200 times.
The final product, a refined bottle with no label and only the brand’s letters engraved on it, “is not necessarily cheaper than mineral water: the basic costs are there, the labour, the investments… we manage to be more or less equivalent or even a little cheaper” than the waters of the large mineral groups that dominate the market, says Jonathan McNicol.
Beyond the “virtuous” aspect of the returnable glass bottle “reusable more than 200 times”, the group also stresses the importance of establishing its small bottling plants in the city centre (as it has already done in Lausanne and will soon do elsewhere) or even within an establishment (this is the case in Dubai within a “resort” of three hotels) in order to limit transport for delivery as much as possible.
In the mineral water industry, “the classic model is a large factory close to the water source, but then there is transport, and we know that this is a very important element in the carbon footprint. We can innovate in the water sector by breaking the carbon footprint while respecting the environment,” believes Mike Hecker, one of the co-founders of Nespresso (successful coffee capsules) and Eden Springs (water from springs).
At the Bristol, a luxury Parisian hotel, Mike Hecker says that bottles of his brand are present in the rooms and conference rooms as well as on the tables of the two starred restaurants.
Brune Poirson, Accor Group’s sustainable development director, said in March that the CAC 40 giant’s choice to offer the Swiss brand’s reusable glass bottles had “accelerated the elimination of plastic water bottles” and was also a response to the fact that “customers are looking for high-end hospitality products.”
Source: BFM TV
