How FC Utrecht Replaced Single-Use Bottles With 500 Reusable City Bottles
In 2023, Dutch Eredivisie club FC Utrecht became the first professional football club to carry the Join the Pipe city bottle, ordering 500 reusable sugarcane bottles printed with its own crest. The club chose a reusable bottle with a sports cap for matchday and training use, printed and shipped from the same city where Join the Pipe installed one of its first public water refill stations.
The order, placed through Join the Pipe's Amsterdam production, used the Utrecht City Bottle as its base: a bottle moulded with a relief of the city's skyline, printed in full colour with the FC Utrecht crest. The club ordered the bottles in the 4-piece configuration, which adds a sports cap and a coloured carrier ring to the standard bottle, split between 400 white and 100 black caps paired with red carrier rings in the club's colours.
Why a football club picks a reusable bottle over single-use cups
A stadium or training ground buying drinkware at scale faces the same sustainability pressure as any venue: single-use plastic cups generate waste every single matchday, while a printed reusable bottle is used by the same player, staff member or fan match after match. For a club, that also turns the bottle into a piece of branded merchandise rather than a disposable cost line.
The bottles are made from 99% sugarcane bioplastic, a bio-based material that is chemically identical to conventional HDPE but is certified CO₂-negative over its lifecycle by Braskem's "I'm green" programme, because the sugarcane absorbs more CO₂ while growing than is released making the bottle. The material is also 100% BPA-free, dishwasher-safe up to 65°C, and compliant with EU food-contact regulation EC 10/2011, the standard that governs what plastics are allowed to touch drinking water and food in the European Union.
Utrecht: where the bottle and the refill station meet
According to Join the Pipe founder Laurens Boschman, Utrecht is also his home city and was where the company installed one of its first public JoinThePipe water fountains, a street-level refill point built so passers-by can refill a bottle instead of buying a new one. FC Utrecht's order lands in that same city: a branded, reusable bottle to refill, in a place that already has public infrastructure built for exactly that.
Other venues buying in this category tend to ask the same follow-up question: not just a printed bottle, but somewhere on-site to refill it. Join the Pipe's own Street Tap is the outdoor refill station built for that, in stainless steel and vandalism-resistant, installed either in-house or together with the local water company. It's the same model used in public spaces and at other sports and event venues.
Ordering a branded bottle for a club or venue
Custom-printed bottles like FC Utrecht's start at a minimum order of 100 units, with full-colour digital printing or 1-3 colour screen print as options, and a digital proof for sign-off before production starts. Typical lead time is about 10–15 working days after artwork approval, plus delivery. One sold bottle also funds one bottle donated to a school child in Africa through the Join the Pipe foundation.
Want a printed bottle or a refill station for your own club, venue or office? Request a quote or browse the branded bottles collection and the Street Tap refill station. Read more about the material on the sugarcane bottle page, or see how Swiss Railways placed refill stations and how IMEX used a mobile refill station at trade fairs.