Fight Against Greenwashing and Destruction of Nature
Environmental Pollution Caused by Pet Bottles – Swiss Room Acoustics Company Impact Acoustic Forgoes Millions in Sales and Stops Supplying Coca-Cola and Co.
The Swiss start-up Impact Acoustic manufactures room acoustic solutions made from recycled PET bottles. The idea of producing desk partitions, acoustic ceilings or sound-absorbing walls for offices and hospitality from disposable items, while making the environment a bit cleaner, has become a resounding success. But as the company expands, global corporations are joining the list of customers who are responsible for global plastic pollution. The two founders Sven Erni and Jeffrey Ibanez have decided to stop supplying the largest beverage companies Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Danone, Suntory, and Nestlé as of October 1. Aware of making their own products obsolete in the future.
Every minute, mankind consumes over one million PET bottles. That’s well over a billion bottles – every day. Of these, only around 16% are collected and an even much smaller fraction will be recycled at all. At the end of their short life, the vast majority of plastic bottles end up in a landfill, in an incinerator, or carelessly thrown away into nature, where they can still be seen and felt hundreds of years from now. In many cases, the bottles are simply exported to poorer countries, thus eliminating the problem from the western world. A reasonable recycling of all the billions of bottles is out of the question and can be never achieved. Impact Acoustic recycles annually, despite global expansion and great efforts, just 16 minutes of mankind’s yearly consumption of bottles. The global, careless consumption of beverage bottles must be stopped immediately!
Worldwide ban on plastic bottles
That’s why the two founders Sven Erni and Jeffrey Ibanez are campaigning passionately to ban plastic bottles worldwide.
“Drinking mineral water from plastic bottles makes no sense,”
— says Sven Erni
“We have the same water quality here from the tap as in the supermarket and yet thousands of bottles of drinking water are produced, transported and finally carelessly disposed of every day.”
A ban would result in Impact Acoustic products eventually becoming obsolete.
“That’s what we’re working towards,”
— Erni says
“Protecting nature is our top priority, and it’s the reason we started the company in the first place.”
He says the mission won’t end until the problems surrounding plastic production and waste are solved.
Voluntary renunciation of sales
A first step toward that goal for Impact Acoustic is to stop supplying acoustic products to the five largest beverage manufacturers – the biggest polluters in the plastic sector. Globally, these are Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Suntory, Danone and the Swiss company Nestlé. Impact Acoustic is thus voluntarily foregoing future planned sales of up to one million Swiss francs a year in the hope that the problem surrounding the bottles will finally be tackled by politicians and industry in the next years.
About Impact Acoustic Impact Acoustic was founded in 2019 by Sven Erni and Filipino designer and architect Jeffrey Ibanez with the aim of combining functional design with social responsibility and sustainability goals. This has resulted in a company that specializes entirely in room acoustics. The production of desk partitions, acoustic walls, ceiling baffles, etc. takes place entirely in Switzerland. The now almost 30 employees are supported in production by people with disabilities. Every year, more than 20 million PET bottles are processed into the high-performance acoustic material ARCHISONIC®, which is used to manufacture the high-quality products. In the meantime, the acoustic products can be found in offices, restaurants and hotels all over the world.