Vivreau’s Water Solutions Reduce Plastic Waste at Home, Businesses, and in Hollywood

Small, conscious decisions are the stepping stones to a more sustainable future.

Through the company’s sustainably forward water systems, Vivreau has been able to prevent upwards of millions of single-use plastic bottles from circulation simply by offering versatile water dispensers to businesses and is helping to reduce emissions in our media industry.

Vivreau sits at the forefront of the war on plastic bottles by creating solutions to provide different types of water to homes and businesses, working to eliminate the need to seek the products in single-use bottles. The company’s products align with government initiatives that are aimed at reducing single-use plastic bottles in public spaces and different industries are adopting Vivreau’s products to keep up with corporate sustainability strategies. Vivreau’s different tap systems offer a wide range of products that can provide chilled, still, sparkling, or boiling water at the touch of a button making it easy for people to access clean, filtered water without the need for plastic.

To find out more about how Vivreau is impacting industries, I caught up with Tom Spillane, VP of Technology, to discuss the company’s solutions and how its products are helping the media industry reduce its carbon footprint.

“When you look at the supply of single-use plastic bottled water, there’s a lot that people don’t think about. The water has to get filtered and filled somewhere, then it has to get put on a truck, then, perhaps, a boat, and then [delivered] to its destination and then placed onto another truck, and then delivered,” explained Spillane.

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“Once it’s delivered it has to be moved throughout a building and put away somewhere. Once people are finished [with a bottle] there’s the whole process of removing the waste from those plastic bottles. So, by adding one of our dispensers, it eliminates those issues associated with single-use plastic.”

For anyone who hasn’t worked or been on a television or movie set, there are a lot of people needed for them to function. This means production can work through thousands of plastic bottles in no time, which can be a huge cost for production as well as a big contributor to plastic waste. With Vivreau’s products, productions can hook up a tap or dispenser to a water source and deliver clean drinking water to a full crew without the need for plastic bottles.

“We calculated for a sixty shoot, the average spending would be about $11,000 on plastic bottles, averaging around 38,000 bottles,” said Spillane.

“We were able to reduce that by 51% to get closer to 5,500 [plastic bottles] with [our] dispensers and reusable bottles.”

Spillane further explained that, once a shoot is done, the dispenser can be easily moved to another shoot, preventing another large order of plastic bottles and saving production even more money with this sustainable option. This commitment to sustainable options falls in line with the Producer’s Guild of America’s sustainable action plan to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance revealed in a report that films with a $70 million+ budget average out to a carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons.

While Vivreau has been around and serving production sets on shows like Grey’s Anatomy and House of Cards, the dispensers are branching out to other Hollywood spotlights to promote its sustainable message. For three years now, Vivreau has partnered with the Vanity Fair Oscar Party to eliminate the use of plastic bottles from the event.

“The Vanity Fair event for the Oscars party, that we’ve done for three years now, we’ve been able to totally eliminate single-use plastic [bottles] by providing reusable bottles that the guests can take home with them,” said Spillane.

“And, after the party, they had a ride share pickup location and we had reusable bottles in [the location] with a dispenser so they could fill up [the bottles] and could have it for the ride home or next destination.”

Spillane was unable to confirm if Ryan Gosling has the Vivreau branded reusable bottles at his swanky home, but Vivreau solutions are making waves in home lives away from Hollywood, too. The popularization of reusable bottles, thanks in part to the trendy Stanley cups, is changing how the younger generation looks at water on the go and Spillane believes that is only going to push the industry forward for more water-saving and plastic-reducing solutions.

“When I was a kid, we didn’t walk around with water. Now, these younger generations carry water with them everywhere they go. I think with that, I think we’re going to see a bigger push towards sustainable solutions,” said Spillane.

“There are definitely better ways of [carrying around water] and I think that the younger generation is seeing that more than older generations. So, I think there’s going to be a bigger shift throughout the next 20 years.”

Whether it’s an advanced water tap, a countertop dispenser, or a reusable bottle, families around the world can change how they consume water, reducing the amount of plastic waste in their households. As more businesses, households, and elite after-parties make responsible choices by adopting these types of solutions, the collective effort can mitigate the environmental impact by reducing plastic waste.

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