Since 2019, Puerto Banús has stopped purchasing single-use water bottles and replaced them with reusable and sustainable water tanks to avoid producing a ton and a half of PET plastic waste that takes over 450 years to biodegrade in the sea.
As a nautical port, one of our major commitments to the environment is the eradication of the use of individual water bottles. Since mid-2019, we have implemented in our offices, administrative facilities, and dry docks the use of water dispensers with reusable 20-liter water tanks.
Like this, we have gone from buying and consuming 0.5 liter PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles, to using reusable and 100% recyclable water tanks. Once empty, they are collected and returned to the production centers of the supplier and under strict security measures, they are sanitized and reused for a period of time untill they are recycled, and the cycle begins again.
Puerto Banús’s consumption policy aligns primarily with the Sustainable Development Goal ‘SDG 12. Responsible consumption and production’, and secondarily with the goals’ SDG 6. Clean water and sanitation’,’ SDG 11. Cities and Sustainable Communities’, ‘SDG 13. Climate Action’ and ‘SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals’.
In 2020 alone, despite our offices and facilities being closed during the confinement period because of the pandemic, workers, users and clients who frequently visited the offices at the port, used 232 water tanks for human consumption. This resulted in saving 9,280 0.5-liter plastic water bottles, which was what was often purchased.
Our goal is to save over 100,000 plastic bottles this decade!
This data shows that during the next decade until 2030, where Puerto Banús has a conscientious commitment to contribute to fulfilling the SDGs, we will save over 102,080 single-use plastic bottles.We take into account that these numbers are minimal; however, because of the pandemic and the new coronavirus, it’s been a year where the consumption of water in our offices has been lower compared to previous years where consumption would have been 30 or 40% higher.
“In 2020 we have eliminated the equivalent to the size of the three largest skyscrapers in the world, if we place the unused plastic water bottles on top of one another”
This way, thanks to this environmental and sustainability policy, in 2020 alone we’ve saved a great number of single-use plastic bottles that if you placed one on top of another (they measure 22 cm), it would reach an altitude of the sum of the three biggest skyscrapers in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (828 meters), the Shanghai Tower (632 meters) and the Abraj Al Bait in Mecca (601 meters). In total, all three add up to 2,061 meters.
It is also important to note that a 0.5 liter plastic bottle weighs approximately 16.7 grams. In one year, it would prevent almost 155 kilograms of plastic from reaching nature and the seabed.
In an entire decade, it would be more than a ton and a half of single-use plastic bottles that would be generated, around 1,705 kilograms, with what this implies energy costs and carbon footprint to produce all the bottles of PVC or PET plastic which are created for a use of time that lasts up to an hour to consume, but takes between 100 and a 1000 years to biodegrade, the average being 450 years.
We invite you to join this commitment to preserve our nature and to improve our habits in life.
