Sustainability

Hey! Guess what!?!? The majority of what you’re drinking in Tea North® is water! Shocker!

While the beverage industry in most First World Countries continues to boom, we are very aware that there is a vast majority of the population that lives without clean drinking water. In our opinion, clean drinking water should be a basic human right, and everyone should have access to it.

In 2019 we decided to donate a portion of our profits (1%) to Water.org for their continued efforts in making clean drinking available to everyone. Over the course of 2019, we determined that was not enough and we could be doing more.

In 2020, we have changed our donation model to give $0.01 for every can we sell. That may not seem like a lot, but if we sold 1,000,000 cans, we would be donating $10,000 per year. We are not a large company, but as our company grows, so too will our contribution to Water.org.

Contrary to popular belief (that metal cans change the flavour of the product inside it), the inside of aluminum cans are coated with a food safe liner that protects the liquid from the metal can, and makes sure the flavour is not affected.

Most people don’t know this, but in 2015 we actually first made Tea North in plastic bottles. We were very small, working out of David’s house, and that’s what was both available and affordable. When we made the move to a carbonated beverage, those plastic bottles did not work out… actually they exploded from the pressure, and we switched to glass bottles.

We were in glass for two years and while glass is great, there are two big problems we had.

1. It’s great to see the colours of the tea, but being exposed to light, creates an unfortunate shelf life issue.

2. They break. It’s a simple fact. You drop a glass bottle filled with liquid onto a semi-hard surface, and that’s it, it’s everywhere.

In 2018, we expand operations, to serve a greater amount of people and have a much farther reach, and in doing so we also switched to cans.

Bottles typically have 20-30 percent recycled material in their composition, while cans have around 70 percent. Cans are also lighter, have a much lower transportation cost, and thus have a much lower carbon footprint.