DBT Bureau
Pune, 9 Sep 2025
- Sam’s Club China has launched label-free Member’s Mark drinking water, reducing plastic, ink, and energy use, and making recycling easier as part of its sustainable packaging efforts.
- Sam’s Club China is updating packaging across multiple Member’s Mark products, removing unnecessary plastics and using more recyclable materials, supporting Walmart’s larger sustainability and Project Gigaton goals.
The only thing more punk rock than being well-hydrated is a steadfast refusal to be labeled. Now, Sam’s Club members in China can do both.
Under the private brand Member’s Mark, Sam’s Club just launched a label-free drinking water, an innovative solution in the company’s journey toward more sustainable packaging.
The choice to strip labels from its bottles means Sam’s Club reduces plastic use during manufacturing, leaving just one material to recycle at the end of the bottle’s use. The lack of a label also reduces ink and energy consumption. But fear not: a case of water is the minimum selling unit, so you still get nutrition facts on the outer packaging of the case. Customer response to the new, label-less water bottle will be a key outcome of this trial effort.
Sourced from nature, and designed to help protect it, the label-less bottles reflect the cleanliness and quality of their contents.
Member’s Mark natural drinking water is sourced from three protected water resources across China: Qiandao Lake in Zhejiang province, Wanlv Lake in Guangdong province, and Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei province.
While the move to label-less Member’s Mark bottles may seem a small one, it’s part of a big goal: Walmart has ambitious plans to become a regenerative company, continually raising its ambitions across climate, nature, and waste and to help people. Walmart has continued to integrate sustainability into its business operations, with sustainable packaging serving as a strategic priority to reduce its operational footprint.
And it’s not just the water that’s getting more sustainable packaging.
Sam’s Club China has upgraded packaging across multiple Member’s Mark items, exploring different sustainable approaches to update its product lineup. The methods are relatively straightforward: remove plastic components where possible, replace them with better alternatives, and redesign processes to make packaging easier to reuse and recycle. Sam’s Club now uses aqueous coating on paperboard packaging for multiple items, replacing biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) film lamination to make the boxes much more recyclable.
Take, for example, the Member’s Mark freeze dried instant coffee powder, a popular staple in China. A recent update removed the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) window patching film, applied aqueous coating to replace BOPP film lamination, and reduced plastic by approximately 5.8 grams per box. And, it looks lovely.
With each upgrade to its own packaging, Walmart and Sam’s Club are leading by example.
To accelerate the industry’s transition to circular, low-carbon business models, Walmart leverages its omnichannel leadership to collaborate with value chain partners and scale sustainable practices. The company launched its Project Gigaton in 2017, partnering with suppliers and NGOs to reduce or avoid 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
By the end of 2024, over 330 Walmart China suppliers had signed up for Project Gigaton, with over 300 partners implementing energy- and emissions-reduction measures focused on packaging.
With its latest steps toward prioritizing more sustainable packaging, Sam’s Club China is making a statement: it wants to inspire its members to weave sustainability into the choices they make every day — making the sustainable choice, the easy choice.
