Klean Kanteen helped to popularize plastic-free, reusable water bottles, weathering two decades by focusing on durable products rather than chasing aggressive growth. Ideals of serving “people, planet and profit” have helped the certified B Corporation endure recent challenges including tariffs that are uniquely hurting smaller businesses. In addition, the brand is adapting from a 2024 buyout and competing against copycats and the persistence of single-use plastic.

“We maintain by staying core to who we are and why we originally started, and not deviate too much from that,” said Global Product Manager Hunter Shoop. 

Standing against plastic

Privately held Klean Kanteen, which does not release sales figures, is navigating its share of the growing, $1.45 billion global market for stainless steel bottles. That will reach $2.08 billion by 2032, according to Data Bridge Market Research.

That said, with two supplier plants in China, Klean Kanteen has found the erratic tariff policies of the Trump administration a challenge. “They’ve jumped from single digits to triple digits, so it’s a pretty large impact on the business,” Shoop said. So far, Klean Kanteen has capped price increases to about $2 on certain products. Its 27-ounce bottles now list for $21.95.

The tariffs have not hurt Klean Kanteen’s sustainability efforts, though, which include working with suppliers to monitor their renewable energy usage and carbon footprints, according to Shoop.

Nevertheless, the Chico, California, business continues to swim upstream in its mission to provide alternatives to single-use plastic:

• Disposable plastic water bottle sales skyrocketed by nearly 3,000 percent between 1997 and 2021 in the United States, according to the Container Recycling Institute. 
• People toss more than two-thirds of the 86 billion bottles sold annually. 
• That $4.34 billion worldwide plastic bottle market will hit $6.46 billion in 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.

Northern California roots

A father, son and daughter took over Klean Kanteen 19 years ago from Robert Seals, a Northern California sculptor who shaped the initial steel vessel. He had made Klean Kanteen a fixture at green festivals, music fairs and grocery co-ops. As some of the first stainless steel refillable options on the market, they appealed to consumers who considered single-use plastic water bottles severely uncool. (Shout out to my early-aughts model from Solar Festival in Hopland, California.)

The company had a headstart against mainstream fears over the health harms of drinking out of plastics, such as cancer, infertility and poor brain development. That gained momentum in 2008, when Walmart yanked plastic bottles containing toxic bisphenol-A from its shelves. Klean Kanteen also rode the wellness wave as bring-your-own-bottle hydration became the norm for gym rats and elementary schoolers.

In February 2024, the family-owned company allowed a third party to take over a controlling stake. That English investor, Think Better Group, is a mission-focused brand-holding group for sustainable products. It’s part of ABN AMRO SIF of Amsterdam, a $571 million institutional impact fund. Its other holdings include Ecoriginals diapers, Colonna Coffee and Minor Figures beverages.

“They’re bringing in some optimization and things like that, but for the most part, we still get to run independently, and it’s business as usual,” Shoop said.

The staff of roughly 40 people often sees the co-owner siblings, Michelle Kalberer and Jeff Cresswell, as the first in the building each day. “Their desks are literally out in the open in the middle of our offices,” Shoop said.

Pursuing certifications

“Everything that we do is around sustainability, trying to drive our footprints down, monitoring and measuring with third-party certifications,” Shoop said.

For instance, Klean Kanteen aligns its climate emissions reductions with those of the Science-Based Targets initiative, although it’s not formally pursuing validation. The goals include a 58.8 percent drop in emissions from Scopes 1 and 2 from a 2016 baseline by 2030, and a 30 percent Scope 3 reduction compared with 2019. The company is also Climate Label Certified.

By contributing 1 percent of gross sales to the 1% for the Planet program, Klean Kanteen has supported 135 nonprofits over 20 years. It will reach $5 million in giving this year, according to Caroleigh Pierce, who leads the company’s partnership and community engagement efforts.

Prizing durability

Making long-lasting, durable products that can be repaired and ultimately recycled underpins Klean Kanteen’s materials and design choices.

“When at all possible, we try and make our products so they can be repaired,” Shoop said, “or making sure that they could also be disassembled for proper end of use.”

A single-wall, non-insulated bottle remains Klean Kanteen’s best seller, especially in Europe. However, insulated bottles are increasingly popular, and an oven- and microwave-safe reusable food box also sells well. 

The company has spruced up bottle designs with colors and patterns, customizing caps for different beverages, but it hasn’t wildly diversified its product lineup. 

Strong sales of replacement kits for lids and their silicone gaskets reflect that customers are buying in to Klean Kanteen’s circularity strategy. How-to cleaning and maintenance videos encourage lifetime use.

Materials and safety

In addition to the circular-economy focus of durability, Klean Kanteen introduced 90 percent recycled steel in all products several years ago. 

“There are other brands that are starting to dabble a little bit here, a little bit there, but we made a commitment to jump all in,” Shoop said. The company worked with the raw steel manufacturer, not just the sourcing managers.

That recycled content, certified by Intertek, includes reclaimed steel from sources such as industrial equipment and even used kitchen appliances and tableware. The steel, a rust-proof alloy of 18 percent chromium and 8 percent nickel, doesn’t leach chemicals or flavor the water it holds, according to the company. 

In addition, Klean Kanteen introduced a Klean Coat finish several years ago to prevent color chipping and dents. The finish is applied by spraying a powder of electrically charged polyester resins that is then heat-cured. 

The company uses the GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals standard to ensure the coating is free of lead, BPA and phthalate chemicals.

Unlike aluminum bottles, stainless steel bottles have no plastic lining. Instead, an electropolish finish smoothes out microscopic irregularities inside each bottle.

Klean Kanteen uses a chemical hazard analysis for its bottle components and packaging as well.

Its focus on chemical safety is reflected in partnerships with the Environmental Working Group and the Breast Cancer Fund. 

Small hangtags for retail displays comprise much of Klean Kanteen’s packaging footprint, although plastic bags wrap products that are shipped. The company tried biobased plastic packaging but reverted to recycled petroleum plastic, which was more likely to be recycled.

Lots of sales happen online, including from Amazon. That said, “We’re not losing sight of our roots and where we started,” Shoop said. “So we’re still in those organic grocery stores and the smaller chains.”

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When RMI surveyed carbon market participants over the past couple of years, the non-profit heard tales that will be familiar to anyone who has navigated the ecosystem’s confusing array of document and data types. Project developers reported spending up to 60 percent of their time dealing with requests for data. Buyers said due diligence could take as long as 18 months.

In July, the organization unveiled its solution: an open-source framework designed to “bring structure to the vast universe of carbon credit data.”

The potential benefits of RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF) are already evident in a pilot catalogue of carbon credits developed by Centigrade, a startup that is partnering with the non-profit. On display are climate projects ranging from fuel-efficient cookstoves in Guatemala to forest conservation in Mississippi. Potential buyers and other users can click through to a wealth of information, presented in standardized form for each project. Data points include number of available credits, estimated price and ratings from third-party agencies.

Hundreds of data fields

Underneath the hood of Centigrade’s system is a framework based on at least 570 fields, grouped into categories and sub-categories. The fields were chosen by RMI’s Carbon Markets Initiative team and integrate methodologies from major registries, including Verra and Puro.earth; quality criteria from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market; and templates for suppliers, such as those developed by Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers.

Widespread adoption of the framework would bring multiple benefits, said Bonnie Lei, an RMI principal. Project developers could make a single set of data available for potential buyers, eliminating the duplicative effort of replying to several different sets of questions. And buyers could assemble candidate projects in a data room for easy comparison. 

Making it easier for buyers to assess credit quality is a focus of the project, added Lei. Free-to-access databases of credits already exist, including one developed by the Climate Action Data Trust, a stakeholder initiative founded by the World Bank and others. But the CCDF is designed to extend these projects by providing additional data. 

“You really need to be able to go into these sets of fields that get into understanding the emissions components of the credit,” said Lei. “As well as the social, environmental dimensions, which we believe are really important and distinguishing for credits.”

One schema to rule them all

To realize the vision of a unified data framework, the CCDF’s backers now need to persuade market players to back it. One wrinkle here is that RMI’s framework is not the only game in town. Sixteen schemas have been submitted to the Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP), a stakeholder initiative designed to develop a common data framework. The project is co-chaired by RMI, which has submitted the CCDF alongside the others. Lei said she expected the different options to be inputs into a single framework that will be published in stages, with the first release planned for Climate Week NYC in September.

If and when the CDOP committee reaches an agreement, adoption will still be a challenge. “There are real costs in terms of coordination and implementation to pulling off this sort of standardization,” said Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions. “Everyone already has their systems in place and I’d imagine changing things comes with all sorts of edge cases and risks. First and foremost, the incentives and benefits of standardization need to outweigh those costs.”

It’s also worth noting that data standardization does not inevitably mean that project developers will share all the information needed to fully evaluate projects. “It’s equally important that everyone can access the actual project and credit data itself,” said Badgley. “That would help make sure that everyone — buyers, sellers, researchers — has the ability to study and evaluate the performance of both individual projects and the market as a whole.”

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Nearly every week brings another brand partnership, factory blueprint or financing deal related to a polyester recycling startup. The space is crowded with young companies seeking to weave together a circular economy that pushes virgin polyester to the margins.

In a few short decades, polyester has displaced cotton as the dominant fiber. It’s found in nearly two-thirds of new fashions. Because it’s made with cheap fossil fuel byproducts, however, the apparel industry’s emissions shot up 7.5 percent in 2023 after a modest dip, according to a June report by the Apparel Impact Institute. And as a result, the industry accounts for almost 2 percent of all the world’s climate emissions.

Brands striving to reduce that impact, along with its regulatory and operational risks, plan to procure more recycled and “next-generation” materials. So far, only 12.5 percent of polyester comes from recycled sources, 99 percent of which begins as bottles rather than textiles, according to the Textile Exchange.

Source: Samsara Eco

It’s no easy feat to court partners in a new, waste-based supply chain within the fragmented textile industry. To begin with, a startup needs an efficient technology to transform unwanted fabrics into something new. It must also procure and sort castoff garments or factory clippings from third parties. Once the buttons, trims and zippers are removed, the material needs to be recycled into a raw output, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) pellets. Yet another partner spins that into fiber, which someone else turns into a textile for a brand.

The final leg in this process: efficient factories. “Ramping to full capacity, which they must operate close to if they are to at least break even, is the big challenge,” said Marcian Lee, an analyst with Lux Research.

Textile recycling executives insist that there’s room for multiple players to spin old plastic threads into valuable textiles. Here’s how five of them are seeking to bring a textile-to-textile recycling system to life.

Circ

Circ is building a $500 million plant in northeastern France. Scheduled to open in 2028, it would be the largest industrial polycotton recycling operation.

Many synthetic recycling startups say they accept textile blends, including polyester-cotton, to produce material for fresh polyester fibers. Circ distinguishes itself by recycling the cotton, too.

“You’re really maximizing the economic value of what’s in that starting material,” Conor Hartman, Circ’s chief operating officer, told Trellis in May. “We’ve taken polycotton originating material and made it into beautiful lyocell products and beautiful polyester products.”

Source: Samsara Eco

Circ’s recycled cellulosic lyocell appeared in a small collection last month from Zalando, which is an investor, as are Patagonia and Inditex. Circ recently inked deals with fiber producers, too, including China’s Tanshan Sanyou and Portugal’s Selenis.

Earlier this year, Circ kicked off Fiber Club, a collaboration to scale recycled fibers that Bestseller, Eileen Fisher, Everlane and fiber producers support. Such bridge-building follows the Circ-Ready community launch of partners a year ago.

Virginia-based Circ has attracted $76.6 million of investment, the most recent coming in 2023 via a Series B raise of $25 million.

Ambercycle

Ambercycle has partnered with Reformation, Arc’teryx and Gap’s Athleta as well as important textile and polyester companies in North America, Europe and Asia, including Shenghong Holding Group and Zhejiang Huilong New Materials of China.

In January, the startup secured an offtake agreement to replace about 20 percent of Danish brand Ganni’s polyester usage. That follows a three-year, 70-million-euro offtake agreement with Inditex in 2023 and another binding deal with brand Mas. 

“We’ve tried to piece together the pathway to get to this commercial scale, because the challenge with us and really everyone in this space is that, out the gate, the competition with existing fibers is pretty significant,” CEO Shay Sethi told Trellis in June.

Ambercycle is developing an enzymatic recycling feature that would allow a multi-fiber output, enabling brands a “one-stop shop” if they want specific blends of, say, polyester, nylon or spandex, according to Sethi.

Last year, Taiwan’s Shinkong Synthetic Fibers provided $10 million toward a commercial plant for Ambercycle, expected to open in 2026. Ambercycle, whose pilot plant has been running in Los Angeles since 2022, has raised $56 million in its 10 years.

Sethi envisions an industry that balances both centralized operations and regional production. “With textile waste, for better or worse, there’s no shortage anywhere you look,” he said.

Reju

With offices in Paris, Reju piggybacks on its Dutch parent Technip Energies, which counted $6.9 billion in revenues last year. The umbrella company’s resources in engineering and chemicals include polyester production. 

Reju’s pilot plant in Frankfurt opened 20 months ago. Next, a large-scale factory planned for the Chemelot industrial park in the Netherlands would recycle 300 million polyester garments each year by 2027.

European Union rules that require brands to take responsibility for their textile waste provide a boost, but Reju is eyeing “regeneration hubs” elsewhere, too. It hooked up with Goodwill and Waste Management last fall to lay a foundation in North America.

Reju uses IBM’s VolCat technology, short for volatile catalyst. “We’re dealing with known chemistry here,” CEO Patrik Frisk told Trellis in May. “Part of what makes polyester so easy for the textile industry is, first of all, the infrastructure for it has been thoroughly developed over the last 70 or 80 years.”

That frees up Reju to build out its circular system, according to Frisk, former CEO at Under Armour. Despite its problematic origins and contribution to microplastic waste, the material is endowed with useful properties and thus here to stay, he said. “We’re able to take away all the stuff that’s bad, and create new again.”

By giving the waste a second life, Reju can potentially design materials that shed fewer microfibers, Frisk added.

Source: Samsara Eco

Samsara Eco

With machine learning, Samsara Eco customizes enzymes that “eat” polyester. Last year, it proved it can do the same for nylon 6,6. The result appeared in a long-sleeve Lululemon top. In June, the startup established a decade-long offtake agreement, vying to provide potentially one-fifth of Lululemon’s overall fiber portfolio.

In addition to creating a $25 million R&D hub in Jerrabomberra, Australia, Samsara Eco is working with Israeli nylon producer Nilit on a recycling plant to open next year in Southeast Asia, home of partner waste suppliers.

“But that will only be the first of our facilities where we’re talking closely with polymerization partners in Europe and in North America as well across better packaging and fashion,” CEO Paul Riley told Trellis last winter.

Samsara Eco has raised $107 million. It aims to give new life to 1.5 million tons of plastics annually by 2030. That’s less than half of 1 percent of global plastic production each year, leaving plenty of room for multiple recyclers, Riley suggested.

“We’re looking at infinite recycling, true circularity across fashion and packaging,” he said, “and an important thing to note is that there is no difference between our molecule and a fossil fuel molecule. We tap straight into the supply chain.”

Syre

Syre in June touted strategic deals to supply Gap, Target and Houdini Sportswear with its chemically recycled polyester, which it says carries only 15 percent of the CO2-equivalent footprint of the virgin standard. Gap alone would use 10,000 metric tons of Syre’s output annually.

First, though, Syre has to break ground on the 12 commercial scale plants it originally announced for late 2026.

Before it even had a demo facility, Syre had an eye-popping $600 million promise of seven years of support from co-founder H&M. The Swedish startup’s long-term end is to recycle at least 3 million metric tons of polyester each year.

Syre is colocating a pilot plant in North Carolina with a Selenis polyester production facility. It has the ambition to bring “gigascale” plants to Vietnam and Iberia in the next few years. “This is the start of the great textile shift,” Syre CEO Dennis Nobelius told Trellis in June.

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Ready to disrupt an industry? You’ve already plucked the low-hanging fruit. It’s time to meet the moment. Drill down, run the numbers and think outside the box. But to truly move the needle, you’ll need to break down silos and align with other game changers.

If the above clichés read like nails on a chalkboard, you’re ahead of the curve (last one) when it comes to recognizing annoying business jargon. The sustainability profession is rife with lingo that lacks specificity, obscures accountability and alienates outsiders. Feel-good adjectives ring hollow. Acronyms distract those not in the know. Worse, the sloppy use of aspirational buzzwords could get you into legal trouble for greenwashing. 

Most of us are guilty at some point, if we’re being honest, and the first step to recovery is recognition. The second step? Memorizing the following glossary — and avoiding the worst offenders in sustainability-speak.

Carbon neutral by 20__ — This means little to a layperson — and less to any professional who knows the difference between principled near-term steps and “progress through offsets.”

Circular — The latest glib term for a complex idea is for too many people synonymous with “recyclable.” Which it’s not — and can’t be if the goal is to create and maintain truly waste-neutral ecosystems.

For a better tomorrow — Picture a sunrise in a fossil fuel ad. Now picture yourself using a less hackneyed phrase.

____________-friendly — Waving is friendly. But whether it’s “earth-,” “eco-” or “carbon-,” it will take much more than Midwestern manners to shift paradigms.

Green — Yes, it’s the color of leaves. But also most slime, some radioactive waste and the odd alien. Something vague enough to cover so much can’t be genuinely meaningful.

Nature-positive/climate-positive — Positive is good! (And too often unquantifiable — or a dodge.)

No net loss — Since when is less bad really a good thing?

Saving the planet — The Earth will be fine. What’s in trouble are humans.

Science-based — Sounds rigorous, but it’s pretty much meaningless unless it’s third-party validated.

Future-proof — Nobody knows what lies ahead, so what makes you think you can brace for it?

Greenwashing — Obviously, excessive usage of this term is not as bad as the act itself but sometimes it sure feels that way.

Leverage — As a noun or verb, this stale chestnut is pretty much on every industry’s Jargon Bingo card. Let’s keep it off ours.

Recyclable — Technically, almost everything is recyclable. Practically, most everything won’t be unless systems exist that make it possible. See also biodegradable and compostable.

Regenerative — Appreciating how natural systems self-perpetuate does not overcome the fact that this term is ill-defined and barely validated.

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The desalination industry is in boom times: Dwindling supplies of freshwater coupled with rising demand are driving annual growth rates near 10 percent. 

The industry, however, consumes large amounts of energy and produces significant amounts of salty wastewater, which isn’t good news for the environment. But an emerging trend — integrating carbon removal into desalination plants — offers hope of blunting those negative impacts.

The trend is visible at a desalination facility in Ma’agan Michael, Israel, where local startup CarbonBlue announced this month that it has begun capturing dissolved carbon dioxide from water flowing through the facility’s inlet pipe. It has multiple rivals in the race to commercialize technology that can be integrated with desalination and other water treatments facilities. These competitors include startups Captura and Ebb Carbon, as well as Capture6, which has plans to work with a desalination plant in South Korea to capture up to half a million tons of CO2 annually. 

Emissions from desalination plants could exceed 400 million metric tons this year, according to projections made in 2022. The theoretical upper limit for carbon removal at desalination plants is more than twice that, noted a recent report on the approach from nonprofit RMI. But limits on the availability of renewable energy to power the process, along with other constraints, mean that carbon removal is unlikely to completely decarbonize the industry. Still, technology from CarbonBlue and others could, if scaled globally, remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 annually.

Capturing carbon and cutting costs

CarbonBlue’s approach is well positioned to scale because it also saves money, the company said. The installation at Ma’agan Michael is an initial test designed to capture up to 400 tons annually. The removal takes place in a reactor that uses lime to pull CO2 from the water. Desalination operators already know that lime can reduce the accumulation of organic matter on membranes, alongside other benefits. CarbonBlue’s reactor controls this process and can cut operating costs by almost 8 percent, said Dan Deviri, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

“Our approach is to provide industry with tools to decarbonize, not only without harming the value chain, but actually to make it more profitable,” added Adam Etzion, the startup’s director of marketing and communications.

CarbonBlue’s competitors are pursuing diverse approaches. Captura is headed by Steve Oldham, a carbon removal veteran who previously led Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture company that was acquired by Occidental, a US oil and gas major. The startup uses electricity to trigger reactions that release CO2 from seawater, which is then captured and stored. Capture6 takes the salt extracted during desalination and generates a solvent for use in direct air capture facilities, while Ebb Carbon uses electricity to create alkaline water, which naturally pulls CO2 from the atmosphere.

Credits are critical for some

In addition to saving money for desalination plants, CarbonBlue plans on selling carbon credits. Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers founded by Shopify, Google and others, pre-purchased 400 credits from the startup in 2023. 

Credit revenue will be more important to some rivals, promoting some recent eye-catching deals: Captura said in March that it had contracted to sell 30,000 credits to Japanese shipping company Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. And last October, Ebb Carbon inked a 350,000-credit, 10-year agreement with Microsoft. (Both companies’ technology can be deployed at different types of water treatment facilities, so the credits may not fund projects at desalination plants.)

The cost-per-ton of these deals was not disclosed, but Oldham and Deviri said current credit prices were in the range of hundreds of dollars per ton. All the startups expect costs to fall dramatically. Oldham said the company’s models project a price between $100 and $150, and Deviri said he sees a pathway to less than $100.

Barriers to scale

The work at Ma’agan Michael does not mean that CarbonBlue is ready to start delivering credits, however. Like other carbon removal companies that rely on lime —including Seabound, which uses the substance to capture CO2 from ship exhausts — CarbonBlue’s process won’t be carbon negative until it can find a sustainable means of producing the feedstock. Current methods rely on heat generated by fossil fuels and produce around 0.8 metric tons of CO2 for every ton of lime. Deviri said his company is building a facility that will produce lime with 40 percent lower emissions than conventional processes, which it will use to supply the Ma’agan Michael reactor in 2026.

Availability of clean power may also hamper scaling. All the processes require significant amount of power and are only carbon negative if renewables are used. The RMI report noted that removal technologies that rely on electrochemical separation of seawater currently consume 1.9 to 2.8 megawatt-hours of electricity for every ton of CO2 removed, equivalent to two to three months of electricity consumption by an average American household. That will likely fall as the technologies become more efficient, but by how much? The magnitude of those efficiency gains may be critical in determining the extent to which carbon removal can lessen the environmental burden of the desalination industry.

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