Americans have a love affair with bottled water, or so says Nancy Dellamonte, an earth science teacher at Kennedy Catholic High School in Somers.
“Presently there are 50 billion bottles of water sold in the U.S. each year,” said the North Salem resident. “About 38 billion of those miss the recycle stream and end up in a landfill.”
Moved by her professional passion for what makes the Earth go round, Dellamonte teamed up with friends Bob and Carolyn Koss of Boulder, Colo., who founded company Ciao Water two years ago.
Dellamonte noted the biodegradable bottles cut the length of deterioration drastically and that no toxins leach into groundwater.
The Ciao bottles are traditional PET-one plastic but are injected with the enzyme reverte that breaks down the 250,000-long hydrocarbon plastic molecule into 4,000 to 10,000 hydrocarbon units more easily broken down by micro flora, she said.
“Conventional PET plastic can sit in a landfill for up to 5,000 years, but this will start to break apart in 18 to 24 months and be totally gone in about five years,” Dellamonte said.
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What remains is water, carbon dioxide and biomass or dirt.
As director of strategic sales, Dellamonte is in charge of business development on the East Coast and regularly approaches area merchants.
“I walked into places with water, information sheets and told them, ”˜This is the next big thing and you should carry it,”™” she said. “We are now looking to expand and get more of our product onto shelves. We”™re looking for distributors and retailers to sell the water in their stores.”
Merchants selling the water include: Somers Mobil, Turco”™s in Yorktown, The Country Farmer in North Salem, Outhouse Orchards in Croton Falls and Shell and Valero gas stations in Brewster.
The water is sold to retailers at $9.90 per case; Dellamonte said “at this time, we don”™t do the volume to justify the bottler dropping the price for us, but we hope to change that soon.”
As Ciao Water picks up steam, a higher volume in sales may follow.
It was the official water of the Democratic National Convention in Denver and Dellamonte said the company is finalizing a deal with White Plains-based Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.
“We have a distributor in North Carolina that”™s doing really well and we”™re about to finalize some deals with distributors in Connecticut and Massachusetts,” Dellamonte said. “We”™d love to have a larger presence in Westchester.”
Though she noted that bottled water sales are down as a whole, when customers see Ciao”™s biodegradable label on refrigerator shelves, it does attract them.
“The consumer is concerned about the Earth and they do want to do their part,” she said. “But, they also don”™t want to give up their bottled water.”
