PATH Water co-founder and CEO Shadi Bakour is a Silicon Valley native entrepreneur who was unwilling to drown in a sea of plastic waste.

“In 2014, California banned plastic bags,” Bakour recounts. And what followed was a trend of all municipalities banning plastic bags across the US and globally. “And that was in the very early stages.”

In that same year, he recalls, San Francisco banned the sale of single-use plastic bottles on public property. “Then, lo and behold, five years later, in August 2019, San Francisco International Airport would be the first major airport to ban single-use plastic bottles.”

“That was a big ‘aha moment’ for me,” says Bakour, “realizing that this is a movement that’s happening.” It always starts with a small drop before the rising tide.

From Stream to Dream: The Refill Revolution

When he co-founded PATH in 2015, supported by funds from friends and family, Bakour’s was the first bottled sparkling-, still-, and alkaline water brand packaged in certified refillable, 100 percent recyclable, BPA-free aluminum bottles. Today says Bakour, it’s clear that PATH led the way for a global movement.

“First there was just the initial kind of trickle of that movement, just starting to build up a little bit of steam. And over the past two to three years, you see now there’s twelve different aluminum bottled water brands on the shelf, and you have … all of these different brands that are trying to go out there and capture market share. But at the time, there was no competition.” Bakour says, “a lot of people thought we were stupid and crazy.”

But the Bay Area company was built around “a bottle on a mission,” ever since Bakour and his co-founders recognized the bottled water industry was thirsting for disruption that could better the world for generations to come: “We’re trying to do good in every way possible.” The mission, he says, “is to inspire the world to #refillit.”

“It is more than just a hashtag, though,” says Bakour. “It’s a lifestyle choice that consumers should make to reuse products, find ways to repurpose products … Essentially, ‘just refill’ is encouraging consumers to reuse and refill because reusability is the pinnacle of sustainability. It’s the greatest form of sustainability. Less is more. Use less stuff.”

Right now, the amount of waste we create is “absolute madness.” Plastic waste is particularly galling to Bakour. The bottled water industry generates more than 600 billion plastic bottles and containers a year, according to a 2023 report. The result? More than 25 million tons of plastic waste—most of which goes unrecycled, and winds up in landfills and oceans.

“So, the more that we can reuse the same product over and over in our lifestyle,” says Bakour, “the less waste there’s going to be. So, it’s refill,” he says, or we’ll continue to have to battle the unprecedented environmental challenges that threaten to overwhelm everyone. 

It’s important to recognize, Bakour reminds us, that “aluminum is infinitely recyclable once it’s in the waste stream, and never degrades. Versus plastic, which degrades over time every time it goes through the recycling process …”

With PATH, well before eventually recycling, the idea is to refill it. Internal company studies show that on average, across its varied core, customers refill PATH bottles about seven times per bottle purchase,” Bakour reports. “So, from that standpoint, you can just do simple math. And, even if you get that bottle once and you reuse it only once and then recycle it, well—there’s still much higher recycling value in aluminum [over plastic].”

About 70 percent of the material used in aluminum cans is recycled into new products—almost double that of glass (34 percent) and plastic (40 percent), according to the company’s research. Whereas, only about 1.3 percent of overall global waste consists of aluminum—which is one of the most recycled materials in the world.

And, by the way, when it comes to refilling, “It doesn’t have to be water,” says Bakour. The company receives images all the time from around the world, demonstrating innovative ways customers find to reuse their PATH bottles. “I’ve seen our product repurposed as a bird feeder, as a planter pot … a makeshift fan holder … just all kinds of creative ideas,” says Bakour. “You can ultimately refill our bottle with whatever you want to refill it with.”

Another key differentiator is local bottling, according to Bakour. “Evian, Fiji, etc.—they’re shipping their water very long distances, and from a sustainability standpoint, that doesn’t make sense …”

“The whole reason that we switched from spring water to purified water in the very early days was because we can localize manufacturing to distribution and minimize the carbon footprint of shipping our product.” The company maintains scalable facilities in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Riding the Sustainability Wave with Partners

Sold in 50 US states and seven other countries, at 55,000+ locations worldwide, the key to PATH’s success, according to Bakour, is alliance-forming: “I think it’s just seeking out partnerships. You know, we’re big on collaboration.”

The company works with corporations as varied as Whole Foods, Apple, Adidas, and SpaceX. It partners with Hasbro on a SpongeBob-branded bottle that helps kids prevent single-use plastic bottles from clogging Bikini Bottom.

“The idea behind the SpongeBob bottles was we wanted to make sustainability fun and engaging for younger consumers and consumers, in general, to make sustainable choices almost as a byproduct of what they actually care about,” as opposed to simply force-feeding them a pure sustainability message, albeit it being urgent.

Further collaborations scale PATH’s impact. “We have Nickelodeon with PAW Patrol, we have Mattel with Barbie,” Bakour recounts. “So many different organizations that we’ve done large scale collaborations … [or exclusive] licensing deals with …  all these different stadiums, arenas, hotel groups, airports … Yellowstone National Park … where we’ve helped them eliminate plastic waste.”

“It’s an easy sell,” Bakour argues, “because it’s something that these organizations are looking for. So, it’s more of how we can partner together to make a larger impact. A lot of these companies, when they think about sustainability, they’re so focused on their mission that they forget about making it intriguing and cool and engaging for the consumer outside of just the sustainability story … it makes you feel good and you’re contributing. Engaging with brands that you want to engage with. It’s a force multiplier,” says Bakour.

PATH built itself into a global brand with partners including celebrities Kevin Hart, Ryan Seacrest, Guy Fieri, and companies such as Ninja Fortnite, Dropbox, and Orangetheory Fitness.

There’s even a segment of the customer base for refillable aluminum water bottles, says Bakour, that see themselves as their own brand. “The custom [bottle] division is a relatively newer division for us, growing extremely fast. It’s explosive growth that we’re seeing because we’re solving a ‘need’ in the market that never really existed. You know, we’re providing a product that is unique, a service that’s unique. We’re allowing consumers to engage with our product and make it their own.” 

“One PATH, one iconic bottle, all powered by the human spirit to do better.”