Part 2: Plastic Vs. Glass - The Story of Tourmaline Spring

Plastic Vs. Glass Part 2 : The Story of Tourmaline Spring

 

Seth 0:00 

Let's go into that now that this is a really important thing because people are so worried about it. There's the environmental aspects of plastic, there's the health aspects of plastic. There's so many different layers and levels to all this. And I am a consummate health advocate. Not only not only am I passionate about all things health, but I do the best I can to live my life every day, where I practice what I preach, literally practice what I preach, and I drink our water out of these plastic bottles with complete confidence. And there's a reason why. There's many reasons why. Let's get into all those reasons why and let's address it from an environmental perspective too, because every once in a while a troll will come by and start pointing fingers, comparing us to the multinationals out there. So let's break all this down so people can really get it from a smaller and a bigger perspective so they understand why we do what we do.

 

Bryan 1:14 

So I can tell you how to cure the issue, you know, but nobody wants to do it. But here's the biggest thing. We have too much plastic in our life here. Okay? It isn't just water bottles, its milk bottles, it's orange juice bottles, look in your refrigerator and find me something that's not in plastic, including the refrigerator itself. Yeah, including your car, including the clothes you wear. It's everywhere. Okay. Water bottles get attacked because people drink so much of it everyday. It’s not you’re drinking 10 sodas a day. But they're in the same bottle, right? You drink so much more water. We just got done talking about how important it is you drink so much water that you It creates a lot of containers regardless, I guarantee you 10 glass water bottles, it's not going to be easy to get rid of either. Yes what we need and what we've been advocating for for almost 20 years now is a nationwide bottle bill, a nationwide redemption plan for all plastics. Nobody gets a free pass, you don't get to exempt milk bottles you don't get to exempt ketchup, all plastics are a nickel a package and you'll redeem about 85% and the post consumer PET is the most in demand product in the world that they make all kinds of things from it, they can down-cycle to other things. It's just that we need to do and there's only like 11 states that have a bottled water redemption program on water. The vast majority of our country, all these plastics go in the garbage or the side of the road. Roadside recycling is a waste of time it has a success rate of like 28%. It doesn't work very well. The only thing that really works is to assign a value to the bottle, you charge a deposit on every plastic container and they'll all come back out of the waste stream into recycling centers. And we'll go a long way to curing this issue in the garbage. Now if people want water in clay pots, I'd be glad to bottle them in clay pots. It just doesn't work. Well.

 

Seth 3:29 

Tourmaline Spring is the rebranded version of raw water, but we initially launched in glass. Let’s tell them what happened.

 

Bryan 3:39 

Yeah, it's too expensive. It was almost $1 a bottle for the glass.

Glass has a heavy carbon footprint. And oh, by the way, other than clear and blue, you can’t recycle other colored glass.

You know any colored glass whatsoever except blue and clear. Every green glass bottle they just crush them up and they sit in these landfills and if they're lucky they'll put them in the bottom of a road a road base and when they're making new roads they use it for like the stiffen up the gravel now that that's they're not recycling any of this stuff.

 

Seth 4:25 

So that's an important thing for people to know because all the environmentalists who step up and complain and point fingers, but it’s very important to keep that in mind.

 

Bryan 4:36 

None of them have any redemption value. Maine has five cents on the bottle we enjoy 85% redemption, Michigan that has 10 cents on a bottle, it exceeds 90%. Almost all bottles come back. So, you know, a nickel a bottle would be a good, you know, a good exchange for it's a very effective, very effective way to get these bottles out of the garbage and it should be on everything.

 

Seth 5:18 

Excuse me if I'm wrong and I gotta be careful what I say here because I don't want to say anything I shouldn’t. Weren't you part of a big bottle water oversight agency? Again, I don't want to name any names of it. And you advocated for this, much to their chagrin, right? They were not interested to the degree that you just backed out.

 

Bryan 5:39 

The proof of that is if you look at the early raw water bottles, they all say, and I think the Raw water does to this day - say we support a nationwide bottle bill that's on the label and it has been from the beginning. So we advocated.

 

Seth 5:55 

Bryan advocated for it as a Water bottler and advocated for a nationwide bottle bill in conjunction with an agency with other bottlers, much bigger ones on it big ones, small ones, all different manners of all different sizes of business structures in this agency network.

 

Bryan 6:23 

Northeast Bottled water association is one of the small guys. I was asked to be on the board of directors back in the mid 2000s. And I was, you know, a young bottler, young to the business and they wanted, fresh input, you know, and so I was on the board and I said, you know, we take a lot of heat in this business for the package, we have to do something about the package. We're getting blamed for the package, and nobody's focusing on the product. And I wrote a long dissertation on a nationwide bottle bill, that we should support this and nobody wanted anything to do with it. Not at all. They didn't want to be associated with the fees or the concept, so I quit the board. I didn’t want to be part of that if we were not going to do something proactive.

 

Seth 7:04 

Why didn't they want to do it?

 

Bryan 7:07 

Because of the cost. The bottler has to absorb some of the costs, but these fees can be passed on to the consumer. I mean, it's just the way it's got to be. There's a fear that the government or the state will try to rob some of those fees, like the government likes to do, and you know, and use it for some other thing, and we would have to resist that kind of nonsense, the deposit should go only and completely to redemption. And it should, as part of the law, we shouldn't allow them to steal some of the money for some other cause, you know, which they like to do, you know, yeah, there is some concern there, but that's a concern with every rule and regulation. You’ve got to make sure it's a focused, targeted thing and you just got to watch and try to prevent that, but it doesn't negate the need for a nationwide bottle bill.

 

Seth 8:06 

And here's the sad thing about it is we know now Okay, and hopefully with hemp being legalized, we're going to see better options. But regardless of that, right now, the technology does exist to be able to do this in a much more sustainable fashion. But until the big corporations, the big bottlers, get on board with these technologies, the small bottlers like us can't touch it, because we can't afford it. We can't even come near it unless they got on board with it. If they literally started implementing all of these solutions that totally exist right now into their business structures, then we could turn things around really quick, but they don't, essentially because it cuts into the bottom line, people are thinking about profit. And then it's just all these stupid reasons that we see now aren't working. That's why we're experiencing and have been experiencing the possibility of systemic collapse.

 

Bryan 9:15 

You know, one other thing, our machine won't do glass. We had to modify our machine to do it basically by hand. So it's not efficient at all. For me to do glass, I would have to buy another machine and you're talking about a half a million dollars. Yeah! And then somebody says, why don’t you do it like boxed water, right, in cardboard. That's much better for the environment. It's lined with plastic anyway, but

 

Seth 9:44 

Now just on a side note, which we can get into later. It's lined with plastic that is highly porous and absorbable and will leach into the water, way, way quicker than most choices. It's crazy.

 

Bryan 10:00 

Tetra pack the company that controls the machine, that would be another machine. It's a special machine. And then all the water has to be sterilized. A lot of people don't realize that all the water in those cardboard has to be sterilized. That goes against everything we do here! So we're not going to put our water in a box, then we'd have to buy it the machine and that requires sterilization anyway that we don't we don't believe in.

 

And people always say you should do it in that and this is always the latest cause celebration of some new package. It's just there's just not a lot of good options, and virgin PET or even some recycled content PET is really the only answer they've come up with and they're searching. Yeah, they're trying to find other options but there are not a lot of choices. And you're not going to have people carrying around glass bottles in their purse, right, the weight of it. They don't seal very well. There's a lot of issues. These are so convenient. You know, you need to take water with you. What's important is you stay hydrated, and you carry good water with you.

 

Seth 11:11 

Yes!

 

Bryan 11:12 

We do the best we can. People need to recycle them. That's still the best use of that product. Keep in mind, of all the beverages you drink, 100% of our product is used for its best use human consumption and how much water is wasted to make beer?

 

Seth 11:34 

Yes

 

Bryan 11:35 

We use 100%, none of our product is wasted in the making of thi,s you know putting this water in the bottle. So it's the best possible use is 100% of our product is in the bottle for you. Focus on what's inside, not what's outside. If the outside mattered Bling would be the most popular water in the world with Swarovski crystals on the bottle.

 

Seth 12:02 

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's an interesting universe. We've had this conversation before. For everybody who's so worried about the carbon footprint of bottled water. You're an airline pilot, right? How much fuel gets burned when people want to get on their plane and go dip their toes in a warm sandy beach somewhere, right? Look at all the other. It's amazing how people will point the finger at a three person water bottling operation yet look at how they conduct their lives. The products they use, the places they focus their attention.

 

Bryan 12:40 

What's interesting is that I gave a speech to the Chamber of Commerce. You want to see a hush fall over the ground. You could hear a pin drop. I'm an airline pilot. I just flew to Aruba and it we burned, I think it was like 10,000 pounds of jet fuel. So you could take your pink little feet and put it in the sand in a room. I think we should ban all leisure air travel. I think essential business travel only what do you think you want to live in Maine where it's cold, then keep your ass right here in Maine and stay here. You want to hear a husk fall over the crowd? Why are we burning all this jet fuel in the atmosphere? So you can just go on vacation? Who says you need a vacation? Yeah, walk there. Right? I mean, everybody gets quiet real fast. Oh, whoa, wait a minute here. You know, they point the finger assigning a moral judgment to these things. It's like yes, a slippery slope.

 

Seth 13:36 

People just have these hair trigger responses that are not well thought out. It's almost like they've just been conditioned to regurgitate whatever information is being fed to them. And that's just that they just like, oh, that's what matters to them. But as soon as you start to go beneath the surface, and look at the reality behind these things you find out that most of us are walking, talking contradictions of everything we portend to represent. So then the question becomes like, okay, we got to forgive ourselves, we got to realize like, you know, rational self inventory here. What are the major priorities, air, water than food. And then from that place, when we've got our health and wellness in check, and we're functioning better, we can think better, we can feel more empathy, we can feel better, everything works better. And from that place, we can start to re-envision and reinvent ourselves according to a model that is more harmonious with nature because none of us are living according to the ideal that all the environmentalists and health enthusiasts just spew out there, you know spew out there so

 

Bryan 15:03 

Just live in a tent, don’t live in a house.

 

Seth 15:06 

Yeah, go outside. Exactly.

 

Bryan 15:09 

Camp under the stars. Make your own structure. Don’t use electricity

 

Seth 15:16 

Or modern conveniences. Yeah.

 

Bryan 15:19 

Make a fire every night.

 

Seth 15:21 

We what we offer is something that nobody in the world has, that we know is so naturally pure that even to the hydrogeologist, the water chemists. We have famous water sommeliers who are passionate about this water. They get the value of this including one of the the hydrogeologist that came up here, up to the spring said, you guys have no idea. This guy who's seen thousands and thousands of springs all over the planet. He said You have no idea how rare it is that water is coming out of the ground, this naturally pure. He's like, he goes, he goes, let me think about it. Because you know what? I think maybe I've only seen one other source in my entire life on the planet that might be this pure, but I don't remember and I have to check. So he can only think of one that might be comparable to this. If you're 40 years in the business. Yeah, it's that rare. It is literally that rare. So let me just back up a second. I want to say a few things here too, because just to recap some of this. We started with glass, okay, and we found out and we were doing it by hand, we were hand bottling, because everyone's like, oh, we're only going to drink water and glass. We want a glass. The issues we found were, it was really expensive for us because, in addition to the cost of the bottle, shipping the bottle there, there's the labor of doing it by hand. Then also we're in Maine, you know, where we get, you know, the spring is up on a mountain. The weather, you know, winter comes earlier to that part of Maine then it does, you know, Southern Maine or anything else. Glass. When you put it on a truck, it gets cold, it freezes it breaks, it's the end of it. That is a massive additional cost. So we ran into all of these traps these pitfalls for

 

Bryan 17:32 

I remember the shippers refuse January February, no glass, we won't accept any glass. It's going to crack it's going to break. They wouldn't even take it the two months of the year or more.

 

Seth 17:44 

So there's another cost associated with that is that the packaging required just to hold the glass itself needs to be really beefed up to be able to prevent it from hopefully breaking. So there's so many people are like, oh, we're only gonna buy it in glass. We don't care what it costs. They didn't buy it. They didn't actually buy it and we saw them going on the back end and ordering it in the PET.

 

Bryan 18:15 

And we confronted them and a lot of these shoes. We have a couple ladies and I knew their name I knew where they live. And the woman said I buy nothing my glass. But I’m like, you used to buy glass, and she’s like, how do you know? How do you know? Because I saw and processed your orders? Yeah, because it's a smaller company. We are I know. And be like nothing happens. I don't know about Exactly. Okay. So that's what we're going for. I want to say one thing. People need to focus on what's inside the box. Yes, yes. Imagine if I said you said what is your favorite liquor? Okay, let's just hypothetically say it's Glen. Leavitt Scotch Okay, or your favorite wine, somebody has a favorite wine and I go Okay, here we'll take this instead what is this? Well, I, I made my own wine and I put it in this in this cardboard thing here for you. But look, the package is so much better. I know it's not Glenlivet, and I know

it's not this, you know, but trust me look at the package. I mean, that would be ludicrous. You. You want a product that you want, for the way it tastes and the way it's made focus on what's inside, not the package, you know?

 

Seth 19:33 

Absolutely. And to that. So this is so that's what our thing with glass was, it just didn't work for us. In addition to everything else that we shared about it actually having a massive carbon footprint. It's not recycled or down cycled properly, depending on the color. There's just so many variables associated with it. So here’s what we do now, we use a heavyweight, this is a heavyweight PET. It's blown. It's off gassed for at usually at least a month three to four weeks, or longer, which means that anything is going to come out of it. It's certified BPA and BPB free, which most people know that doesn't even matter anymore because there's so many other plasticizers but it's certified free of that. So it's blown. It's off gassed. It's cold filled with the spring water which comes out of the ground at 46 degrees. And we've used the same source of plastic for 15 years right, from the same exact source. A lot of other companies, we're not going to name names, they have all their bottle blowing equipment on-site, they blow them right on the spot and fill them while they're still warm. They haven't even off gassed and they filling them with water. So we've used the same source, off gassed, cold-filled and we test it. We've been testing this for the entire 15 years, every we test this water constantly, it's tested once a year for an entire full battery. It's tested every three months for a lot of other various things. And it's tested every time we bottle for other for bacteria things. So this is so heavily tested both from the source and as a finished product. And not once has there ever been any phthalates, any plasticizers any metals, anything that is inherently in plastic has ever showed up in any of our tests. But okay, there's a caveat to this. The water needs to be stored like you would a wine it needs to be kept. This water has been underground in the dark forever. Essentially. So when it comes out of the ground, it is put into these bottles, it is put into cardboard boxes that are further protect it from light. And it should remain that way. Because heat isn't so much the destroyer of the structure and integrity of the water as is light, light will begin to break things down. So that's the most important thing. If this is kept in the dark there, what you get in the bottle is going to be what comes out of the ground. So I just wanted to get all that in and say that.

 

Bryan 22:41 

With intention, yes, like you would have find that refrigerators are what, 35 degrees, something like that. It's in the ground at 46 or so that's the core temperature down there and emanates basically the same temperature so we like to say we want to keep it like it was 46 degrees. So that's cool. It doesn't have to be refrigerated. It just needs to be cool and dark like it is underground.

 

End…

 

I am going to passionately and shamelessly plug Tourmaline Spring because it deserves it.

 

I’m suggesting that people need to know about this water, try it, and become part of the already regionally established recurring customer base, and discover what they know about Tourmaline Spring.

 

There is a reason why we have a customer base that continually reorders from us. There are customers from before the time that Bryan was ever the Steward and had preserved this great source - that have been customers for 40 years.

 

There were customers who had children with asthma that were using inhalers that were able to stop using them after making this special water a consistent part of their routine. This water improves lives.

 

We suggest that you try to drink it for a week or two and then see if you’re able to go back to something else. It’s doubtful your body will let you.

 

You can order cases direct from www.TourmalineSpring.com, or if you want to order by the pallet and do “water-shares” (where you team up with other’s in your area to have a pallet of 60 cases shipped to you), then email us through our website or at info@tourmalinespring.com

 

This water is better for your health than the highest quality organic foods are.

 

And at a time in history where people are so disconnected from nature, there isn’t a better product or element that you can find anywhere that offers the opportunity to help individuals get in touch with their own inner nature and the natural world. You are literally taking the naturally purest essence of water that has been refined for thousands of years by the Earth, to a degree that no man-made machine is capable of.

 

This is a rare gift that few have access to. If the world knew what this water was, there wouldn’t be any left for those who hadn’t already come on board. The spring only produces 250 thousand liters a day, and that’s it. Right now we bottle less than half of 1%. We are not drilling into it and taking a drop more than Mother-Nature provides, and as long as we are the stewards of it, we will prevent big corps from buying it and destroying it.

 

Read through all our info online and try the water and you’ll understand why we have such a loyal customer base who are grateful for our vision.

 

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Thank you for your time and consideration.