Plastic & Carbon Savings Calculator
See how many plastic bottles and how much delivery pollution your office would cut by going bottleless. Handy when you need a number for a sustainability report.
What your office drinks today
Change any answer and the figures below update right away.
Staff plus regular visitors. This sets how much water gets drunk in a year.
Count the ones the company buys, from the fridge, the vending machine, or the meeting room. Put 0 if nobody uses them.
The suggested jug figure covers whatever the bottles do not, based on a quarter gallon of drinking water per person per workday. Type your own number from a delivery invoice if you have one.
Hot tanks and carbonators draw more power, so both push the cooler side of the ledger up. Not sure how many units you need? Run the office cooler sizing tool first.
Headline figures always show one year. This adds a running total for the period your report covers.
Fine tune the assumptions
This only changes the landfill figure. Recycling a bottle does not undo the carbon spent making and shipping it.
Plastic containers you would stop using
7,678containers a year
7,500 single-serve bottles plus 178 five gallon jugs, for 30 people.
About 0.91 metric tons CO2e avoided each year
| Line item | Now | Bottleless |
|---|---|---|
| Making the bottles7,500 bottles, 165 lb of PET | 552 | 0 |
| Filling and shipping bottled waterTreatment, filling, and the long haul to your door | 1,653 | 0 |
| Jug delivery178 jugs, washed, refilled, and trucked | 239 | 0 |
| Cooler electricity1 cooler, hot and cold, running all year | 0 | 357 |
| Filters and the unit itself2 filter changes a year, plus the cooler spread over its life | 0 | 67 |
| Tap water supplyTreating and pumping the water you actually drink | 0 | 8 |
| Total each year | 2,443 | 431 |
| You avoid | 2,013 lb CO2e a year | |
That is about the same as
- 2,283 milesnot driven in an average car
- 44 treesdoing a full year of work
- 123 lbof plastic kept out of landfill
Over 1 year, that adds up to 7,678 containers and 0.91 metric tons of CO2e. These are estimates built from published averages, not a measured audit. If your report needs a defensible figure, swap our factors for your own supplier data using the boxes above, and keep a note of what you changed.
Every factor this tool uses
| Factor | Why it is there | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Drinking water per person | Sets total demand and the suggested jug count | 0.25 gal a workday |
| Bottle weight | PET, by size: 12 oz, 16.9 oz, 20 oz, 1 liter | 8, 10, 12, 18 g |
| Jug plastic per fill | A 750 g jug reused 40 times, plus a fresh cap | 24.8 g |
| Making plastic | Resin plus molding, cradle to gate | 3.3 kg CO2e per kg |
| Filling and treating bottled water | Plant energy for single-serve | 0.05 kg CO2e per liter |
| Shipping bottled water | Plant to warehouse to store to you | 0.15 kg CO2e per liter |
| Washing and refilling a jug | Sanitizing, rinsing, capping | 0.15 kg CO2e per jug |
| Local jug delivery | Stop and start truck freight, allocated by weight and distance | 0.6 kg CO2e per ton mile |
| End of life | Landfill and incineration, net of recycling | 0.04 kg CO2e per kg |
| Cooler electricity | Cold only, hot and cold, or sparkling, running all year | 0.55, 1.2, 1.5 kWh a day |
| Grid carbon | US average, editable above | 0.37 kg CO2e per kWh |
| Filters | Two changes a year, cartridge and carton | 2 kg CO2e each |
| The cooler itself | Building one unit, spread over an eight year life | 24 kg CO2e a year |
| Tap water supply | Municipal treatment and pumping | 0.0005 kg CO2e per liter |
| Car comparison | Average US passenger car | 0.4 kg CO2e a mile |
| Tree comparison | One mature tree, one year of growth | 21 kg CO2e |
We chose the conservative end of the published range wherever sources disagreed, and we subtract the cooler rather than ignore it. That makes the saving smaller than most calculators show, and much harder to argue with. If a supplier hands you a bigger number, ask which of these lines they left out. For the money side, run the cost estimate tool or read bottled vs. bottleless. Still picking hardware? Try the cooler type selector or browse all guides and tools.