In the Irish harbour town of Courtown, BRITA and Seal Rescue Ireland handed 1,000 water filter jugs to residents – and asked only that they report what changed. Weeks later came an estimate no laboratory produced: tens of thousands of single-use bottles avoided each month.
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Courtown is a small harbour town in County Wexford, on Ireland’s south-east coast – around 3,600 residents, a beach that fills in summer, and, like every coastal community, a front-row view of what plastic does to the sea. Here, BRITA and the conservation charity Seal Rescue Ireland tried a simple experiment: give away 1,000 water filter jugs at the harbour, ask people to switch from bottled water, and let the town itself report what happens.
The idea had a forerunner. A village on Mallorca had shown some years earlier that a community could largely step away from bottled water. Courtown became the second attempt – this time with a named local partner, a fixed number of filters, and one condition attached to every jug handed over: tell us how your water habits change, and how many bottles you stop buying.
The scale of the habit being tested is easy to state and hard to picture: globally, well over a million plastic drinks bottles are sold every minute, by widely cited industry estimates. Coastal towns see the end of that chain first. For the residents of Courtown, the question was less abstract – would filtered tap water actually hold up against the bottled routine, in cost, in taste, in convenience, week after week?
A few weeks later, BRITA’s team returned to the harbour to collect the answers. What the residents reported – and the number they arrived at together – turned a giveaway into one of the more instructive small-scale cases in the company’s plastic-avoidance work.
What the residents reported
The follow-up conversations surprised even the volunteers. Many residents reported that doing without single-use bottles had turned out not just cheaper but genuinely more convenient — no crates to carry, no empties to store, less household waste at the kerb. Taste, the most personal test of all, held up. By the end of the trial weeks, most participants said they intended to keep the change rather than return to bottled water.
The ask attached to each jug had been deliberately light. No forms at the harbour, no committed programme – just a request to talk, weeks later, about what had changed. That lightness mattered: the experiment was measuring ordinary behaviour, not compliance, and the answers were franker for it.
The number nobody measured in a lab
At the end of the experiment, BRITA and the residents did the arithmetic together and arrived at an estimate: the switch was avoiding several tens of thousands of single-use plastic bottles per month in Courtown alone. It is worth being precise about what that number is – a joint, self-reported estimate from a few thousand households, not an audited measurement. BRITA publishes its verified global figure separately: in 2025, its products replaced around 6.1 billion bottles worldwide. Courtown’s contribution to that total is statistically a rounding error. As a demonstration, it is something else entirely.
Why a seal charity handed out water filters
Seal Rescue Ireland, based in Courtown itself, spends its days rescuing and rehabilitating marine wildlife – work that puts plastic pollution on the examination table, literally. For a giveaway meant to change local habits, the charity brought what BRITA could not: neighbourhood trust and a first-hand account of where discarded plastic ends up. The partnership followed the pattern BRITA applies elsewhere – pair the practical alternative with a local organisation that owns the cause.
What a town-sized experiment proves
The experiment’s real product is the question it leaves behind: if one town of 3,600 can keep tens of thousands of bottles a month out of circulation, what would a county do – or a country? That is the scale BRITA now plans against: its ‘Be a Gamechanger’ initiative, launched on World Water Day 2025, targets eight billion avoided bottles per year by 2030. Courtown gave the global number something it cannot give itself: a place, names, and a before-and-after.
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Sources & further reading:
BRITA Sustainability Report 2025
Last reviewed: August 2026
