When Co-Cre8 and the Honest team first launched the Honest Bottle, it was acknowledged that providing the reusable product would only go some of the distance towards reducing the UK’s dependency on single use water bottles and containers.

It was with this understanding that at the same time as the bottle’s launch, the team also got its Honest Project campaign underway. The aim of the initiative? To enable reuse by increasing accessibility to publicly available drinking water.

This month, that bold project has started to take some real shape, thanks to a new collaboration with Sodexo and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT).

Under this new partnership, MFT has now introduced hydration stations at two locations, offering free water refills for visitors and staff who bring their own reusable drinks containers.

Damian Sleep, business director at Sodexo Health & Care, MFT’s facilities management partner, said: “We are committed to doing all we can to reduce the use of single-use plastics and this new initiative will help encourage visitors and staff to move away from buying single-use bottled water to reduce the amount of plastic in circulation.

“This will only be successful if we make it easy to refill bottles and create long-term behavioural change by increasing the uptake of reusables so that we can then eliminate the sale of single-use plastic water bottles.

“This change represents a pioneering move on a site that typically has around 15,000 people on it daily.”

Honest’s sales and marketing manager, Georgia Bell, added: “Each 500ml water refill eradicates, on average, 12g of single-use plastic. During the six months the hydration stations have been in use, almost 50kg of plastic waste has been avoided. 

“Considering more than 2.5 billion units of bottled water are sold through UK retail outlets each year, there is an opportunity to eradicate 34,000 tonnes of single-use plastic, providing that water refill stations are in greater abundance than they are today. This is one small step that will facilitate that change.”

The initiative at Central Manchester Hospital is the first activation from The Honest Project, Honest’s purpose-driven initiative to increase accessibility to publicly available drinking water and funded directly from sales of the Honest Bottle.

It’s also the first joint collaboration with Sodexo which is already exploring more locations on the site and other locations nationally in partnership with Honest.