Nestlé Waters North America announced it is the recipient of a 2010 Gold Connecticut Quality Improvement Award’s (CQIA) Innovation Prize for its next-generation Eco-Shape™ half-liter bottle, which uses 25% less PET plastic than its predecessor Eco-Shape™ bottle and is among the most environmentally responsible packaged drink choices on the market.

«As a company that depends on natural resources, sustainability is an integral part of our values and business, and we understand that reducing the amount of plastic in our bottles—or ‘lightweighting’—is the best thing a beverage company can do to reduce its environmental impact. Our next-generation Eco-Shape™ bottle is the latest step in our company’s long history of addressing our products’ life cycle through innovation,» said Kevin Mathews, Director of Health and Environmental Affairs at Nestlé Waters.

In February 2010, Nestlé Waters commissioned a first-of-its-kind peer-reviewed life cycle assessment (LCA) to better understand the environmental impact of bottled water and alternative beverages. The LCA found that Eco-Shape™ is one of the most environmentally responsible packaged drink choices primarily because it contains the least amount of plastic among the packaged beverage options reviewed in the study. Weighing an average of 9.3 grams, the next-generation Eco-Shape™ bottle uses 60 percent less plastic than the company’s pre-Eco-Shape™ PET bottle, first introduced in the mid-1990s.

Eco-Shape™ is credited with reducing Nestlé Waters’ carbon emission equivalents by more than 356,000 tons since 2007—the equivalent to removing 78,000 cars from the road. Eco-Shape™ also features a label that is 35 percent smaller on average than the previous label, saving nearly 10 million pounds of paper annually.

The 24th Annual Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Conference on Quality and Innovation will take place on Friday, October 29, 2010 in Westbrook, Connecticut.