Company official Chuck Miga says there is a dire need for his product due to the “incredible waste involving bottled water.”

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — Walk into the home organization department of any Kmart store across the country and you’ll see shelves of bright red, gray, blue and orange plastic bottles designed to filter tap water and to give users an alternative to expensive and increasingly controversial bottled water.

The new bottles are being marketed to take on nothing less than the massive market that produces an estimated 26 billion to 28 billion units of bottled water each year in the United States, where only about 10 percent are recycled. Shoppers are invited to buy the brightly colored new bottles and reuse them in place of some 500 or more disposal bottles before replacing the filters.

Packaging of the so-called LivPURE Fit & Fresh filtered water bottles showcases an image of Earth from outer space, and touts two major slogans: “Good for the Earth” and “Save Money.”

You have to scrutinize the bottom of the packaging to find that each bottle is “Manufactured and Distributed by Medport LLC, 23 Acorn St., Providence, RI.”

Medport, a tiny company, rolled out the new product this spring in Kmart, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and other stores. Next month it will be on the shelves of thousands of Walgreens.

The closely held company doesn’t release sales figures, but executive vice president Chuck Miga says the new bottles are doing well, “meeting or exceeding retailers’ expectations.”

The bottles have been featured in a video on the Home Shopping Network. (/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiiqsJaLEs8&feature=related) and touted by activists battling the bottled-water industry.

The new bottles got mixed reviews from people writing to the Home Shopping Network. Some people loved them and the taste of the water they produced. Others, mostly older people, complained about having to squeeze the bottles to force the water through the filters.

The bottles are yet another innovation for Medport, the company founded by the late Jeff Jacober, who died along with his wife and a son, and another family, in a plane crash in 2005.

Medport has focused on health and wellness products. Six years ago, Jacober said Medport had sales of $10 million. It has grown since then.

As it rolled out the new LivPURE bottles under its Fit & Fresh brand of healthy living products, the company reported that it controls 73 U.S. and international trademarks and patents on various products.

The Fit & Fresh brand includes a range of food containers, drink mixers and food preparation products. Other arms of the company sell medical devices.

All this is produced by a company that has 25 employees working out of an industrial building in Providence’s Olneyville section and another 8 in China.

The bottles are manufactured in China, but they were designed, tested and marketed in the United States.

Miga said Providence is a great place for product innovation. He has four designers that include a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Great model makers work in the region, so as the designers crafted new bottles, they quickly saw their two-dimensional drawings turned into three-dimensional models that could be better seen and tested.

The company looks for a need for new products and tries to design items that its marketing staff thinks they can sell.

“We felt there is definitely a need for these bottles because of the incredible waste involving bottled water,” said Miga.

Environmental groups across the country are sounding alarms about the growing use of bottled water. The Sierra Club has launched a national campaign focusing on the waste of disposable plastic water bottles and the toxicity of the bottles themselves. The National Resources Defense Council did a study that found that about one-third of the samples it looked at had excessive contaminants.

Wellness Enterprises, a Florida company that produces its own filtered-water bottle, Wellness H2.0, is partnering with an advocacy group called the Center for A new American Dream, on a “Break the Bottled Water Habit Campaign.” (See www.EndBottledWater.com.)

Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., recently wrote that the nearly 28 billion plastic water bottles manufactured each year in the United States require 17 million barrels of oil. Hauling the bottles to stores consumes another 50 million barrels of oil each year, he said.

“The good news is that people are beginning to see how climate disruptive this industry is,” Brown wrote in an essay released Aug. 5.

He said some city mayors are banning the purchase of bottled water with taxpayer funds. Finland has banned the use of one-way soft-drink containers. And Brown touted refillable glass bottles as requiring only 10 percent of the energy per use as an aluminum can that is recycled.

Rhode Island Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva-Weed, seeking to do something to slow the mountain of trash that is rapidly filling the Central Landfill, introduced legislation this year seeking to encourage recycling of bottles by placing a deposit on each one sold. The bill was held for further study.

The concept for the Fit & Fresh bottle was hatched about a year ago, Miga said. It took about six months to take it through design, model making and then mass production.

To keep the bottles affordable — they were selling for $9.99 at Kmart last week — the filter was designed to reduce chlorine content by 50 percent. (Filters were selling at Kmart for $7.99 for two.) Filtering devices designed for use on water drawn from lakes and streams generally sell for much more, Miga said.

“Manufacturing and creating a product is one thing,” he said, “but you need to get it out to the consumer.”

To make the product appealing to consumers, Miga said color is a huge issue. So is packaging. And it has to work.

Mindful of recent reports of the dangers of bisphenol A used in many water bottles, Miga hastened to say the chemical was not used in his company’s bottles.

“Generally speaking Fit & Fresh has a unique position in the market place,” he said. “We continue to initiate great ideas for the brand.”

Miga said the company is working on new consumer products, but he declined to describe them, other than to say, “In 2009, we are looking into getting into different parts of the consumer’s life.”

For more on Fit & Fresh products, go to www.fit-fresh.com

For more on Medport, go to www.medportllc.com

plord@projo.com