“The Crossroads of the Gourmet Community”

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Concord, Mass., famed for being a flash point at the start of the American Revolution, is now a flash point in the growing effort to ban plastic water bottles.

The town, urged on by 82-year old activist Jean Hill, voted this month to ban all sales of bottled water, becoming the first community in the United States to do so.

“All these discarded bottles are damaging our planet, causing clumps of garbage in the oceans that hurt fish, and are creating more pollution on our streets,” Hill told the Boston Globe.

While there’s some talk as to whether the ban will withstand legal challenges, Concord’s action is part of a growing trend toward finding greener ways to hydrate, leading to new business for vendors offering a solution to disposable plastic bottles, and new products for retailers.

The trend caught the attention of Meghan Prestidge, owner of The Concord Shop, a kitchenware retailer in Concord, even before the bottle ban.

Prestidge had ordered the SodaStream, a device that lets consumers make their own club soda out of tap water.

“We started selling it before the ban was passed because we heard of other towns taking action toward reducing plastic around the country,” she says.

“It’s been a huge seller,” she notes. (She also sells a line of locally-made agave-sweetened concentrates–bottled in glass, not plastic--for making fruit sodas with the SodaStream sparkling water.)

Once the bottle bill passed, one of her reps suggested adding the Bobble, a BPA-free bottle that lets consumers filter their own tap water. Prestidge put in an order and says she expects the Bobble to appeal to her environmentally conscious customers.

While consumers recycled 636 thousand tons of PET plastic beverage bottles nationwide in 2006, 2 million tons--more than three times as much--went into landfills according to The Container Recycling Institute, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit group that promotes recycling.

Prestidge says she has always paid close attention to where her products are sourced and what those products are made from, because she knows her customers care about the safety of the materials used in kitchenware.

“I think the idea of going back to glass or something better than plastic, isn’t a bad idea,” she says. “We seem to be going back to the old ways of doing things. We have a community of people who have own chickens. I sell butter churns because people are milking cows to make their own butter. We sell grain mills so that they can grind their own flour. It is interesting how full circle things are becoming.”