Culligan Water recycling initiative
Every year Culligan Water uses many thousands of aluminum quick change cartridges to help provide a convenient alternative to bottled water. Each cartridge is giving the equivalent of up to 6000Lts of bottle-quality water and is saving many tons of used plastic bottles being discarded. However, Culligan is still concerned with the large quantity of used cartridges going into landfill. Our recycling program is in place to recycle our returned Aluminum Cartridges. There is around 200g of Aluminum in each cartridge.
Over 12 months ago Culligan partnered with a local waste recycling company to come up with a process to recycle all used cartridges. At present all used cartridges are collected by Culligan service technicians at the time of filter replacements and then returned to the Culligan warehouse. Technicians return to the warehouse on a weekly basis for stock replenishment as part of their weekly activities, so no extra transport is required.
On return to the warehouse the cartridges are drained of water and are stored ready for collection by the recycling company, this occurs every 2 – 3 months. The cartridges are processed with all aluminum being recycled and the remaining plastic and carbon is processed by industrial shredder and sent to landfill.
We are also looking at improving the process by extracting and recycling the polypropylene used in the cartridge – this we hope to have happening in 2011.
