The GreenBottle Story

I met a man who ran the local tip and I said to him "what is the tip full of these days" and he said "plastic bottles, especially milk bottles, and worse still people screw the tops on and we cannot even crush them with the bull dozers so the tip is full of air".

That got me thinking and so I did a bit of research and found out that the statistics for plastic bottles were just horrible. I thought that in 2006 we should be able to do something better and greener. I had always been interested in paper ever since my young son came home from nursery with a paper-mache balloon. I distinctly remembered looking at and thinking "moulded paper - how interesting - usually paper is flat".

When I did some research I found that the pulping technology used in milk bottles was well developed and designed for making high volumes. The problem was how to make the bottle waterproof - here the solution was fairly straight forward - a bag.

If the bag were made loose inside the bottle then the consumer could remove the bag, once the milk had been used, and dispose of the bag and the cardboard in separate recycling streams. If the consumer does not recycle then the whole bottle will crush flat at the landfill and over time the cardboard will decompose leaving the small residue of the bag.

Once I had developed the concept, I needed to see the inside of a dairy. So I rang a number of friends and said "anyone know anyone with a dairy" and one friend referred me to the Marybelle dairy. I went to see them and explained what I was doing and they said "we'll back you" - simple as that. So I went away for a few months and then they called me and asked what was going on - I had been busy on other projects. So I quickly went to my model maker, Henry, and he made a single beautiful bottle.

Triumphantly, I went back to the dairy and they were suitably impressed. I then said -"why don't we go and see one of your customers before I spend a lot of money on this?" They sold to Asda locally and suggested them. I was a little taken aback to find that we were going to see Asda in their head office - but decided "what the hell - lets go for it" - so off we trotted to Leeds and saw the local sourcing manager who loved the whole idea and asked "who else has seen this - can we have some sort of exclusivity?"

I remember clearly standing on the pavement in Leeds, by the river, and calling my wife and saying "I think I've just started another business". The rest just sort of follows on - although the store trial in May in Lowestoft was fantastic. Just to see the bottle being bought off the shelves and going down the check - out conveyers was something else - what a buzz. After that lots of automation, fund raising, sourcing of pulp, business development - lots of great days - but can they match those initial buzzes?

Martin Myerscough
Technology Director