Mountain Valley Spring Company Nurtures Nature

For most of us, living sustainably means taking lots of small steps each day to do the right thing by nature. The same goes for Mountain Valley Spring Company, which started out close to nature in 1871 and in the 145 years since has taken deliberate steps to stay that way.

Mountain Valley draws its pure water from where it always has: a natural spring in Arkansas’ Ouachita mountains. But company representative Stuart Scott says it continually finds new ways to preserve that and other natural resources, such as practicing low-impact water withdrawal; reducing packaging; using less energy in manufacturing; choosing renewable energy sources whenever possible; recovering and reusing as much packaging as possible; and incentivizing employee recycling.

“Mountain Valley is inherently connected to the land,” he says. “That’s why we use 50 percent rPET in our PET bottles and 35 percent recycled glass in our glass bottles. Our larger bottles, for traditional water coolers and dispensers, can be returned to Mountain Valley, where they are thoroughly cleaned and reused. Our most popular sizes are the 5-gallon and 2.5-gallon glass returnable bottles. I believe some of them have been used over a hundred times. Think how many bottles that has saved from recycling or the landfill.”