The milk bottle that is made from paper

From The Sunday Times
July 5, 2009

The Sunday Times meets the man who has put plastic out to pasture


It looked like an ordinary milk bottle. In fact, what Martin Myerscough was carrying in his briefcase for a presentation to supermarket giant Asda was the world’s first milk bottle made almost completely from recycled paper.
Myerscough, 52, an inventor and engineer from Framlington, Suffolk, had done away with plastic, the necessary evil favoured by the packaging industry that is cost-effective, light and durable but which takes centuries to decompose.
While British households used more than half a million plastic bottles last year, only 35% were collected for recycling. The rest were added to the 130,000 tonnes of plastic already in landfill sites.
The idea of reusing and remoulding pulped paper came to Myerscough after his son came home from school with a papier-mâché balloon. He devised the GreenBottle, an outer shell made of office waste paper moulded like an egg box, with a loose plastic bag inside to hold the milk.
The bag can be recycled but even if it isn’t, it takes up considerably less space than a plastic bottle would. The cardboard around it decomposes within weeks. Myerscough says it takes only a third of the energy needed to make a plastic bottle, and argues that its carbon footprint is 48% lower.
He approached Marybelle, a dairy farm in Suffolk, which thought that the project could work. What appealed to it most was that the design for the package fitted existing filling lines. “Dairies don’t have to make any changes to switch from plastic bottles to ours,” explains Myerscough.
“We started in milk because that is something most people buy every day. It was a good, high-profile place to start.” Myerscough then set up the meeting with Asda, one of Marybelle’s customers, at the supermarket’s Leeds headquarters in 2006, to see whether a large retailer would take the product.
Asda liked the idea and agreed to take the bottles on a trial basis. The GreenBottle company was formed.
Retailers have been under pressure from the European Union and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to cut the amount of packaging and, in turn, the waste they produce.
“We are doing a lot to reduce packaging,” said Chris Brown, Asda’s head of ethical and sustainable sourcing. “Milk is a huge volume line for us — we sell 500m litres a year.”
As a first step Asda agreed to put 250 bottles in its Lowestoft store and see how customers responded. The 50 bottles put on the shelves on the first day were sold in an hour. Now GreenBottle produces about 1,000 a week, supplying Marybelle’s semi-skimmed milk to three Asda stores in East Anglia.
“Customers get it and it’s not forcing them to make too many compromises,” says Brown. “It looks like the plastic bottle that they are so used to.” At £1.41, the two-litre bottle means most consumers can afford to make a greener choice.
There are other advantages. GreenBottle is manufactured from waste paper and can be further recycled, creating a “closed-loop” system.
Myerscough said: “We had some good contacts, like Charles Dunstone at Carphone Warehouse, who is very ecologically minded and agreed to provide waste paper for GreenBottle,” says Myerscough. “In due course they will be delivering about a tonne a month.”
GreenBottle is now talking to one of Australia’s leading dairy groups. “We have the demand for the product; it is just a question of getting our new production on stream,” adds Myerscough.
“The machinery that we are ordering will be capable of making about 1.5m two-litre bottles a month by next year.”