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Bisphenol A’s Impact on the Promotional Items Industry

water bottles This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

Everyone knows that the plastic bottles for packaged water are bad for the environment and bad for your health. The promotional items industry knew this as well and seized on this to promote the reusable plastic bottles ubiquitous in gyms and office promotions.

Water bottles became big business for us. Then came the Bisphenol A scare.

Overnight plastic bottles were out. If you are in the business of promotions and brand management it really did not matter if the plastic water bottle your client had purchased in the past was made with Bisphenol A or not. All water bottles got painted with the same brush.

So what happened?

Well basically overnight, and industry wide, the plastic water bottle orders became steel or aluminum water bottle orders. And then - due to the rush, the tragic earthquake in China which was one of the main manufacturing areas for these items, and basic distribution issues - the aluminum water bottles sold out.

We had often sold Bulletline’s 21 ounce light-weight aluminum Mojave Sports Bottle for around $4 with single color imprint. It is a industry favorite. I could not locate these things anywhere.

At one point I actually contacted SIGG corporate sales to fill a promo order for a client. We needed 600 units - unbranded. Even SIGG could not help us at that quantity. Seriously. It seemed you could not locate an aluminum bottle for promotional uses in the U.S. for over a month, and now the inventories are still small because the demand is so high.

Businesses must protect their brand. Whether they are green-washing or truly sincere in their efforts to be better corporate citizens, they are paying attention. The push back is becoming too great for them not to be.