The New Zealand entrepreneur behind beauty business Ethique is gearing up to launch a new eco-venture.

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Our thirst for a tasty bevvy is insatiable, but it comes with a hefty plastic price for the planet: 580 billion plastic bottles every year. Drinks giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi were the number one and two brands with the biggest share of identifiably branded plastic waste, according to a recent global study.

“This industry needs to change,” says Brianne West, founder of the multi-million-dollar sustainable beauty business Ethique. “I just think it’s a disgrace. They keep backing down from all these promises they’re going to make and in the meantime, they’re coating the planet in plastic. They are selling us our own water, flavoured with sugar and colourings. I mean, the whole thing is just bonkers.”

Imagine if, instead of buying a bottle of fizzy drink or cracking open a can, you could simply dissolve a tab in a glass of water and, voilà, have a glass of cola or blackcurrant or whatever delicious thirst quencher you fancy. This is West’s solution to an industry drowning in plastic: flavoured drink tablets in plastic-free packaging. “It’s like a bath bomb for your drink, except that it tastes delicious,” she explains.

Dubbed Incrediballs, the tablets will be a more sustainable option in a number of ways, according to West. First, compostable packaging cuts out fossil-fuel-derived plastic bottles. Second, you’re not shipping around truckloads of water, so you’re cutting down on transport emissions. You can get 100 times more Incrediballs into a container than you can equivalent bottled drinks. Incrediballs will also use food waste wherever possible, for example in citrus extracts, and all ingredients will be natural.

Incrediballs are being developed at a lab in the UK, but West says the goal is to eventually manufacture onshore in New Zealand. Nonetheless, the extra transport miles don’t add much in terms of carbon emissions when compared to a bottled drink.

After “a lot of technical food science”, Incrediballs are looking to launch in a few months’ time, initially with five or six flavours. Last week, West staged a taste testing event in Christchurch, which revealed both “clear favourites” and “some things we need to tweak”. Further down the track, she aims to produce a functional range with calming and energy formulations, and a cocktail range. “They taste great. We don’t just want to make slightly flavoured water. We want to make really impactful delicious drinks that you want to drink over and over again.”

“This is quite a heavy topic we’re tackling,” West says, “but the way we want to do it is fun. Because at the end of the day, we want to make people feel good about making a choice that genuinely has less impact on the planet than their alternative.”

How worried should we be about the cloud?

This is an excerpt from our weekly environmental newsletter Future Proof. Sign up here.

I currently have a few thousand unread emails languishing in my inbox, mostly old marketing newsletters and piles of unread science journal press releases. I have a similar number of photos backed up from my phone: screenshots, sunset snaps, and many, many pictures of my dog.

Collectively, everyone’s data adds up. We’re creating content at a mind-boggling pace and scale: 54,000 photos are taken every second, and this year we’re estimated to create around 120 zettabytes of data. By 2035, data creation is predicted to exceed 2,000 zettabytes. Printing out just one zettabyte would require paper from 20 trillion trees (except we only have 3.5 trillion trees on Earth), or would fill more than 212 billion standard DVDs.

Much of our digital information exists in the “Cloud” – which sounds like an airy, non-physical concept, but in reality is a very physical, very large hard drive somewhere: in a data centre stuffed with servers. These data centres require electricity to power them and (often) water to keep them cool. Millions of servers become e-waste every year. This means that all your digital memories have an environmental cost, as Shanti Mathias points out in this excellent story.

Consuming data also has a carbon cost. Video streaming takes up the lion’s share of the world’s digital footprint: one hour of watching Netflix emits about 55g of carbon in Europe – a figure that varies widely between users based on the mix of renewables/fossil fuels powering the electricity grid, the resolution you’re watching at, and what sort of device you’re using to watch.

Data centres are responsible for about 1% of the world’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Another estimate puts the carbon footprint of the internet and all its associated gadgets as bigger than that of the airline industry. One silver lining is that the energy efficiency of data centres and devices has improved rapidly, meaning energy demand hasn’t ballooned in-step with the data boom.

Here in New Zealand, Mathias notes, data centres mostly use renewable energy. But if you use an international service like Google, your selfie photoshoots and email archives could be stored in a data centre powered by fossil fuels. As more companies look to build data centres in Aotearoa – including global behemoths like Amazon – we face challenges including water use and growing our renewable energy capacity to keep pace (not just with data needs, but with electrification of other things like transport). The incipient artificial intelligence revolution is set to send the digital economy’s carbon emissions into overdrive, too.

What does this mean for me, and you, as senders of emails and snap-happy smartphone photographers? You can go on a cathartic deleting spree (which has the added bonus of extending the life of your gadget) but really, the climate impact for an individual is pretty negligible. Even streaming your favourite show is a fairly low-emitting activity, in the scheme of emitting activities.

Nonetheless, I think there’s something valuable about being more considered in our digital habits: deleting the duds and only keeping the best, unsubscribing from emails that encourage us to buy, buy, buy, unscheduling Zooms that could be emails instead. And more often, simply switching off.