Students across the country will be capping their first full month of school on Friday, with the enrollees surely having taken in compelling lessons they will carry with them throughout the year and beyond. Sarah Kauss is so keen on keeping them mindful of one such vital duty—their responsibility as protectors of the environment covered in their science textbooks—that today in New York City, each public and charter high-school registrant will receive a stainless-steel water bottle courtesy of S’well, her Manhattan-headquartered company.
As yet another means to reduce the nation’s reliance on single-use plastic goods, the donation of 320,000 S’well bottles dovetails with the Bring It initiative that City officials claim will reduce the use of the ubiquitous plastics in the aforementioned schools by 54 million. Certainly ambitious, that plan has earned solid backing from Kauss, whose brainchild has added the Big Apple educational outreach to S’well’s plastic bottles displacement goal of 100 million by 2020. That objective is likewise an enterprising quest on the part of her entity, which has acquired clout and some backlash over its eight-year existence.
In partnership with NYC, we are proud to announce #BRINGITNYC. Tomorrow, 320,000 S’well Bottles will be gifted to every public high school student in efforts to #ReduceTheUse. Learn more about the program via @NYTimes. https://t.co/yVory3kmRi
— S'well (@swellbottle) September 23, 2018
While the pro- and anti-plastic sets will continue to debate on how detrimental single-use bottles are to the environment, there should be no need to dispute the promotional possibilities. Kauss has New York City’s public and charter schools covered, but she is sort of singular in that she helms a consumer retail company. The sheer number of the donated bottles will generate press beyond today’s display of generosity, as it is a given that schools will be charting how they have helped the Bring It plan come to fruition and Kauss will definitely, thanks to S’well’s branding presence on the bottles, reap a few benefits aside from being a voice for environmental concern.
Therefore, distributors can find themselves doubly delighted, too, by helping schools to devise their own branded water bottles and being able to revel as promotional products industry figures who have realized the importance of waster consideration and who have joined the cause to a far greater extent. Granted, New York City is colossal, having hit an all-time population high last year, and there is the temptation to see it as too daunting to tackle, but we have to remember that S’well has only the public and charter high schools addressed.
There are still gobs of educational sites in the metropolis to make pitches to, but we certainly do not need to restrict this topic to those types of schools or even New York City. Single-use plastic materials are going to inspire many more conversations, so it could be an easy sell for a supplier to give a school in any state that extra marketing plug that could come in handy for recruitment and/or the acquisition of grants. In other words, canning plastic could prove a concrete way to gain a client’s business and respect simultaneously.
