Every morning for breakfast citizens of the world consume a great deal of milk, orange juice, yogurts. Once breakfast is finished, we throw out in the garbage a large quantity of packaging and plastic in the trash, often forgetting that we are harming the environment. In the UK, over 5 million tonnes of plastic are used every year.  Most plastic bottles are not biodegradable and are usually made from oil, a very costly resource. With the price of oil often on the rise, the price of water bottles is also on the rise.  In order to protect our environment and to save money on bottles, GreenBottle from the UK has launched an interesting initiative that is forward looking: a milk bottle made out of recycled waste paper that can obviously be recycled once again, after the milk has been consumed. This initiative has had a positive outcome so far and hopefully it will be extended to all sorts of plastic bottles from water to juices.

Plastic bottles are made from oil, a nonrenewable source and in most cases these bottles are not recycled and are vulgarly thrown in landfill where they can take more than two hundred years to decompose.  Alternative technologies such as bioplastics like Polylactic acid (PLA), a or polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), yet the problem is that these new technologies are too costly and are often too slow to decompose. Martin Myerscough, an English inventor and engineer, has come up with a much greener and efficient solution in order to replace milk plastic bottles: a milk bottle that is made from paper, also known as the GreenBottle. “The outer shell is made from paper which can then be recycled, or if left it will just decompose within a matter of weeks. The inner liner, which takes up less than 0.5% of the space of a plastic bottle if dumped in a landfill, prevents liquid from contaminating the paper outer” (Source: http://www.greenbottle.com/about-us/ ). Myersough claims to have had this brilliant idea after his son came home from school one day with a papier-mâché  balloon. He constructed the milk bottle with on outer shell made of recycled paper and implemented a plastic bag to hold the milk. The plastic bag is meant to be recycled and in case it isn’t it still has less plastic than your average plastic bottle, in addition to also holding up less space. The outer shell made out of recycled paper can be recycled once again. The plastic bag needs to be seperated from the bottled in order to be recycled properly. “The manufacturers claim that it has a carbon footprint 48 per cent lower than that of a plastic milk jug” (Source: http://www.greenbottle.com/documents/news/the_times.pdf). This is a simple alternative that every citizen should put into practice to lower their daily water footprint. Retailers and businesses all over Europe have been pressured by the European Union and the Department for Environment, food and rural affairs in order to diminish packaging and therefore the quantity of waste that is produced.  The first 50 bottles put on the shelves of a Lowestoft store where sold in one hour on their first day in the store.  Customers all over the world have an increased awareness to environmental issues and the numerous damages caused by plastic bottles. The GreenBottle alternative works because it is a simple alternative that isn’t forcing customers to comply with many compromises or switching costs. Indeed, after having reached an agreement with Asda (british supermarket chain retailer), for Lowestoft stores, to sell the milk paper bottles at the same price as conventional bottles. Even the cardboard bottles cost “around 30% more to produce than plastic bottles, Mr Myerscough believes the price will even out when they get to higher production runs” (Source: http://www.greenbottle.com/documents/news/independent.pdf ). If this new paper milk bottle is as popular as they hope, Asda is hoping to launch them nationwide “in an attempt to cut the three-million tons of plastic that is thrown away in the UK annually” (Source: http://www.greenbottle.com/documents/news/independent.pdf).

The GreenBottle is a long-term sustainable green alternative that will hopefully spread all over Europe and eventually in the United States. This is a simple alternative in order to large quantity of un-recycled plastic bottles. The bottle has been designed in a simple way in order to be torn apart so that you can easily and quickly separate the paper to be recycled and quickly place it in the bin. This environmental friendly milk bottle is compostable and biodegradable and the hope for the future is that such similar invention should be applied to water bottles and all other sorts of plastic containers.