Tag: Sustainabiility

They are officially announcing their new second-generation bottle platform, which they call PB1, on Thursday. 

This time, they are relying less on bioplastic and putting more emphasis on fiber bottle technology that can be recycled using the paper recycling infrastructure already in place. “The mission of the company has always been to effectively develop a strong case study that offers a picture of what it could look like to move beyond plastics,” says Cove CEO and founder Alex Totterman.

The company says that their first launches in 2026 will include a focus on cosmetics and personal care, and they think the volume of the PB1 bottle could be measured in the “tens of millions of units” by the year after.

Cove, which has raised $29 million so far, began about seven years ago with a problem, curiosity, and a hopeful solution. While working for a water purification startup, Totterman came face-to-face with the massive problem of microplastics. “I’ve always been very interested in sustainability, more on solving it than being worried about it,” Totterman adds. “It just seems sort of obvious—why wouldn’t you try and find a solution?”

This first solution was Cove’s initial product: a single-use water bottle made from polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHA. This mouthful of a polymer is made by fermenting sugars and fats from cooking oil gathered from local restaurants, and the bottles made from it can theoretically biodegrade within one to five years. While this sounds awesome in theory, Cove faced all sorts of barriers: It was expensive to create, relied on inconsistent industrial composting infrastructure, and bioplastic bottles themselves ran the risk of mucking up conventional recycling streams. 

“For us,” Totterman adds, “it was about going back to the first principles of if we want to really have the impact we’re looking for, how do we deliver the biomaterial in a format that would actually work?”