PLASTIC pollution is a hot topic at the moment and one North Yorkshire business has made a landmark move to benefit the environment.

Harrogate Water, Britain’s oldest bottled water brand, has announced it has successfully secured sufficient availability of recycled PET to ensure its bottles will contain 50 per cent recycled content from April this year.

This means the amount of recycled content will match that of Harrogate’s glass bottles, which have been produced with half recycled glass content for many years.

All materials used by Harrogate Water are 100 per cent recyclable and none of the company’s waste goes to landfill.

Harrogate Water CEO James Cain said: “It is not an inevitability that plastic bottles end up in our rivers and oceans.

“We all have a responsibility to ensure that we dispose of our packaging properly and recycle our bottles so that they can go on to become another bottle or other useful product, just as we already do with our cans and glass bottles.

“We shouldn’t think of them or refer to them as ‘single use’; they can have an infinite number of lives.”

Harrogate Water is also a partner of Keep Britain Tidy and has jointly launched a campaign aimed at raising awareness of the importance of recycling PET plastic bottles on-the-go.

The Incredible Shrinking Bottle Campaign urges consumers to dispose of their bottles responsibly, by twisting them down and putting the lid back on, making them easy to carry to a recycling point or take home for kerbside recycling.

Harrogate Water is Britain’s largest family-owned independent supplier of naturally-sourced bottled water which comes from within a Site of Special Scientific Interest.