Dive Brief:
- Chicago’s United Center, the nation’s largest indoor professional sports and entertainment arena, has a new multi-year agreement with water treatment systems and solutions company Culligan International, which will provide alternatives to single-use plastic water bottles throughout the venue.
- As the official water partner, Culligan will offer its BPA-free aluminum water bottles for sale at all concession points. It will also install new water fountains, refilling stations, multi-functional faucets and recycling bins.
- A Culligan spokesperson also said the upcoming Chicago Marathon in October will replace all single-use plastic water bottles at the finish line with aluminum bottles for approximately 50,000 runners.
Dive Insight:
Chicago, the third-largest city in the U.S., has struggled to improve its recycling. Its residential waste diversion rate is below 10%. But venues like sports stadiums offer contained areas for messaging and collection, which has made them a popular testing ground for closed-loop recycling and reuse programs, along with other waste diversion innovations such as reverse vending machines or even on-site materials recovery operations.
Chicago is not the first city with an arena to transition away from single-use plastic bottles, though it is the largest. United Center, which recently held the Democratic National Committee Convention, has 23,500 seats, hosts over 200 events annually and is home to the National Basketball Association’s Chicago Bulls and National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks.
In Denver for instance, where aluminum packaging maker Ball has the naming rights to the sports arena, concessionaires transitioned to aluminum beverage packaging. Ball was targeting a 90% recycling rate for its cups. The aluminum was to be collected, bailed and monetized to generate revenue for the arena’s owner and operator, according to Ball. And in Seattle, Climate Pledge Arena hit its functionally zero-waste goal and eliminated single-use plastics as of October 2023.
Beyond sports and entertainment venue settings, aluminum water bottles have become more commonplace, positioned somewhere between a single-use and permanently reusable product, via brands like Path Water. Popular QSR Chipotle announced a partnership with Open Water this summer to offer aluminum instead of single-use plastic water bottles at its locations.
BlueTriton Brands this year launched its water labels, including Pure Life and Deer Park, in aluminum bottles at a higher price than its existing plastic-packaged offerings. While PET is still the dominant packaging substrate in this space, there has been an 83% increase in water packaged in aluminum containers between 2015 and 2024, and aluminum has approximately 36% share across all types of waters, including sparkling and enhanced products, according to data from market research firm Mintel.
